


Whatever Became of Our Youth (It Went Into Hiding)

by Annapods, PoliticallyObsessedScholar



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Angst, Audio Format: MP3, Homophobia, Hurt and comfort, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mentions of Attempted Suicide, OMGCP Backup Bang, Podfic, Podfic + Fic, Podfic Length: 3-3.5 Hours, The Permeability of the Closet, This was supposed to have Raising Helen vibes but it's firmly in No Reservations territory now, coming out willingly and/or unwillingly, hockey is a business and a game, mentions of bullying, mentions of overdose, mentions of sub-par parenting, strong and/or offensive language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-16
Updated: 2017-11-16
Packaged: 2019-01-30 19:40:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12660108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annapods/pseuds/Annapods, https://archiveofourown.org/users/PoliticallyObsessedScholar/pseuds/PoliticallyObsessedScholar
Summary: The Seattle Schooners score the biggest coup in modern hockey history - on the same day they announce trades with the LV Aces and Providence Falconers. It's the Trade of the Century, nobody knew it was happening, not even Jack and Kent. Jack's newly single, Kent's the king of NDA and dash. Now they've got to reperfect their patented no-look one timer, deal with the years in between, and inconvenient feelings.  Shouldn't they be past this already?Written byPoliticallyObsessedScholarand read byAnnapods.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Download the whole podfic [here on dropbox](https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ssyu8v6j8vul51d/AACx1UmG_dKihdyYbLl6TvbSa?dl=0).

**[Listen here!](https://www.dropbox.com/s/nc2edyyan33w9h8/%5BCP%5D%20Whatever%20became%20of%20our%20youth%20%281%29.mp3?dl=0) **

***

The body next to him stirs in its sleep and whacks Kent hard when Suzi Quatro starts singing _wake up, little Susie, wake up_. He was a good lay, so Kent charitably decides to assume that Steven - no, Jenkins- no, Armand - no, he got nothing, thought that he was the alarm clock. Kent slides his feet out from underneath an extraordinarily comfortable duvet and twists them towards the hardwood floor. Which, Kent is thinking decidedly uncharitable thoughts about last night’s lover. Decidedly. Uncharitable.

Hardwood floors are fucking freezing ok? They’re like a thermonuclear conductor of cold. Which isn’t helped by the fact that, and this is the salient detail, three am is always the coldest part of the night. No idea why that’s the case, but it is, and Kent would get a scientist to check except he’d rather his tax dollars fund something important, like saving the Great Barrier Reef rather than confirming something which would generate a “no shit, Sherlock” from anyone sane. So what kind of a dumb-ass puts hardwood floors, in their bedroom, in the middle of a desert?

Kent lets the music keep playing as he slips into his skinny jeans, pulls his snapback from off the top of the fan - which, fucking how? - and loosely buttons up his white shirt after giving it a delicate sniff. He’s just finished getting into his shoes when the body on the bed starts muttering about how he would appreciate Kent turning off that God-awful music since _some_ people have actual jobs to do. Well, this guy was totally lying when he pretended not to recognise Kent in the club.

Which is good.

It means Kent has no guilt when he cranks up his alarm right as Suzi Quatro is screaming about their reputation being shot before shoving a NDA and pen into the guy’s bleary face. He gets sworn at a lot - “I’m a fucking decent human being you arrogant, entitled asswipe” - while he stands there resolute and then hears “you weren’t even a good lay, you’re a fucking tight-ass, you fucking twink-ass shit.” as he slips out of the apartment.

The woman in a pantsuit - dark circles under her eyes, pink lipstick slightly smudged - who is coming down the hallway, pulling a suitcase, clearly hears it too. She turns to look at him with disdain, which is when Kent has to awkwardly pull out another NDA (he’s always prepared, Anthony from PR has some very scary stories) to have her sign. She makes sure he understands that she doesn’t appreciate this minor inconvenience in her life before agreeing that she will not say who she saw in her hallway, or even that she saw anyone in her hallway. Ever. On pain of very expensive, very protracted, lawsuits. She then walks away, heels clicking, perfect brown hair falling loosely out of the bun at the back of her head.

Kent moves toward the elevator, tilts his head down, and thinks about how NDAs are really just the grown up version of pinky-promises. Like seriously, they can’t really do shit if they are breached. The last guy he slept with was named Mike and he worked part time on a construction crew - they wouldn’t even be able to get much out of Mike even if he did sell the story. Which, Kent had seen the way the guy lived, it would be logical.

Kent completely understands screwing other people over when it’s in his best interest. Hell, he’s done it a lot. He’s tried to stop. His step-brother is a priest and, like, this one time he’d been talking about a sermon and Kent had been convicted or some shit. It was really trippy. Kent didn’t even know what he believed. He had a vague idea that there was probably a deity out there but beyond that - fuck if he knew. Still, he was fucking trying to be at least a decent human being. He doesn’t think he does a great job.

He makes his way out of the apartment complex and then into the dirty street. Las Vegas could really use a clean-up but since it is, in his step-brother’s words, the moral cesspit of humanity and a temple of greed, the litter is to be expected.

He summons a taxi and heads back to his apartment. The city passes empty and dark; in the distance he can hear music and raucous laughter, but he’s far enough in the suburbs that all he can see is the poverty hiding just around the corner. He tends to look at the sky instead; stars aren’t fucking depressing.

When he gets to his apartment he stumbles through the door and calls hello to Kit when she gives a sleepy murp from the direction of the bedroom. He yawns and eyes the time - four something am - before deciding that going back to sleep is a non-event. He’s got to go do an early morning radio interview at seven and, well, sleep isn’t worth it. He flicks the electric kettle on then turns to the fridge, which is as empty as it usually is after a roadie and, let’s be honest, most of his life.

He doesn’t look too hard when he pulls out his ground coffee and milk. Then he spoons some of the coffee and pours water into the French press, scrambles around for his syrup, presses the plunger down, and pours the whole concoction into a mug. Clutching it in both hands he makes his way to the balcony and leans out. The mug is spreading warmth through his hands and just a little way down his arms. He takes a deep sip: it tastes rich, and smooth, and slightly sharp on his tongue. Just like always. Just how he likes it.

The city is spread dark, sprawling, but lit up underneath him. He’s got his life exactly how he wants it. Maybe not how he pictured it when he was young and dumb and seventeen but that doesn’t matter. The sun won’t rise for another two hours or so but he likes the night just as much. He’s well acquainted with the night - with its rhythm and its denizens. They’re friends, he thinks, the night keeps his secrets. It always has. It always will.

***

Jack thinks that his life is unfairly cinematic. He’s got a whole _thing_ going - running across campus to declare his love before leaving for summer, beating Rimouski and leading his team to the Memorial Cup, attempting suicide rather than potentially bringing dishonour to his father’s name. Unfortunately, the moment right before he went to bed last night was another one of those cinematic moments.

He’d arrived home to find Bitty sitting on the last of his suitcases. Bitty had walked up to him, cradled his face in his hands, and then said softly, gently, that it wasn’t working. That they both deserved better. That he loved him but didn’t see a future with him. Said: _I’m sorry, Jack. I’m so sorry_ . Then he left, Senõr Bun under his left arm, case in his right. That could have been a scene out of one of his mums’ movies. In fact, he’s fairly sure it _was_ a scene in one of her movies, the one with Charles Yves that made her America’s Sweetheart? Yeah, it was that one.

He walks into the Centre and through to the locker room, carrying Bitty’s last pie - a breakup pie. The guys predictably descend on it but before long he hears Tater exclaim that pie tastes like sadness and ask if everything is ok with Littlest B. When Jack finally manages to struggle out that “we, uh, broke up,” Tater stares at his pie in horror, drops it, and wraps Jack up in a tight hug. Jack likes this hug. It feels safe and warm and, ok, it’s really got to stop soon or he’ll be crying and he’ll never recover from that.

Luckily it does stop. Unluckily, it is stopped because he’s told that Georgia wants to see him in her office. That’s not a good thing. That’s definitely not a good thing.

Jack knocks on the door and slips in. Georgia is sitting behind her mahogany desk, hair loosely in a pony-tail, pencil tucked behind her ear. There’s a stack of files on her desk and from what he can see on her computer, it looks like she has far too many emails.

She smiles at him and tells him to take a seat, but Jack knows Georgia Martin, that smile is just a touch too wide. He knows what’s coming and it settles into his stomach like lead. He’s about to be traded. He hopes he’s wrong, he hopes that the C on his chest will protect him and she’s just telling him about someone else, but he knows it won’t. He’s heard the whispers, they all have.

(“The Falconers are in a worse state than the Oilers.” “Is it even possible to be in a worse state than the Oilers?” “Clearly, because the Falconers are.”)

George looks at him and starts talking about how he’s a valued player, and how the Falconers are really sad to see him go, but they’re taking the team in a new direction. They really liked having him here and she, personally, pushed to make sure that the team they’re sending him to is one where he’d really fit.

Jack wants the hot chocolate his family’s cook, Josephine, brewed. She always made it proper - smooth and soft, topped with whipped cream and chocolate bits - whenever he had a bad day. He drank a lot of it in the months following the Draft. He thinks he needs one now. He’d kill to have one right now. He’s just had a long term relationship dissolve on him. Twice. In twelve hours.

In a daze, he shakes George’s hand, says it’s been an honour, then makes his way to start clearing out his locker. As he does so, he can hear the horrified whispers of the rest of the team, a couple of them coming to clap him on the back and wish him well but “not too well,” laughing nervously as they say so. Underneath it all, the smiles are wan and tight. If Jack goes, everyone knows Tater’s not far behind. Neither are a lot of other players. If Jack’s going, then it’s clear the Falconers are scratching out the core of their team and starting again.

Then he’s walking out of the Centre for the last time. Turning and looking at that red-brick facade with its glass dome that took up so much of his life. That he poured so much of his heart into. That promised him friendship and family but just ripped away both. The sun isn’t quite hot enough yet, it’s not even nine o’clock, cars are still passing on their way into work and his life is over.

With a sigh, he leans against his car, takes a deep breath in, he’s too shaky to drive yet.

Jack’s being traded to the Seattle Schooners, out in the Western Conference and that’s even worse than being traded. He’ll have to play against Kent so much more. The media will be relentless, hounding him, it was bad enough during the playoffs. He is going to have to start all over again. In a place no one knows him without even Bitty’s pies to smooth his way. They’re all going to hate him. Oh God, they’re going to -

_The bass is pounding so hard that he swears he can feel it, he swears that if it was just a bit louder it would shake him apart._

_Laughter._

_At the right frequency anything can come apart, the way glasses always do when someone sings soprano in cartoons. They proved it on Mythbusters._

_“ -ent was like -Oi! Watch where you’re going!”_

_It’s thrumming through him, he can’t settle, and his body is restless. Why does it have to be so hot?_

_“I Fucking LOVE this song!”_

_There are drinks being handed from hand to hand. Someone bumps into him, steadies themselves by pushing against his chest, then staggers off again, leaving behind a stain smelling vaguely like alcohol and a steady drip-drip-drip of liquid from his arm onto his shoes._

_“Oh-mi-God-Annie!”_

_His heart is beating faster and faster. Discordant. Just enough out of step with the bass that he feels even more unstable. Ratcheting up, up, up. There are so many people in this house. If he can just get through to where he can see Farlo and Rox standing with the other seniors he might -_

_“ -just a spoiled brat snorting fucking coke or some shit and we’ve all got to pussyfoot around him.”_

_“It’s not even as if he got into Samwell for any reasons other than daddy’s name and mummy’s alma mater anyway!”_

_“Hey, hey, Farlo, twenty bucks he pulls a Horton before the semester's done.”_

_“Nah, nah, fifty bucks he pulls a Svatos.”_

_Laughter._

They’re definitely going to hate him in Seattle.

 *** 

“I’m sorry, what?”

The boardroom is quiet. He watches as GM Stan darts a quick look around the room and takes a deep breath before speaking:

“We’re trading you, you’ve got until -”

“Funny enough, I got that part. What I didn’t get was how that works with the fucking no-trade clause which you were all so excited to offer me.”

Coach Mark, sitting next to Stan, has a slightly pinched look on his face. He rubs his hand across the back of his neck and then focuses all his attention on his colleague, who’s still speaking.

“You’re in breach of your morality clause. Under the terms of your _limited_ no-trade clause in the contract, we’re obliged to trade you instead of -”

“ - publicly, of course, we’ll say that you asked us to waive it. A fresh start and all that so you can -”

Jesus, they both look so out of place - tripping over their words, leaning forward earnestly, while trying to assure him that they’re still on his side.

“I don’t believe this. I poured my - I brought you two Cups. I won the Calder. I’m the league’s top scorer. I’m the face of the whole - you’re _trading me_? For breaching my morality clause? I haven’t done anything wrong!”

There’s an awkward silence settling in the room. Outside, he can see the city moving at a slower pace than usual. It’s too early for hangovers to be gone. Too early for any of the clubbers or gamblers to be up. It’s still busy though. Las Vegas isn’t just a gamblers paradise, no matter what his step-brother thinks.

Across from him, GM Stan is looking awkwardly at Coach Mark, neither of them wanting to speak. They look, they look almost... almost ashamed. And oh. Oh, of course. Kent speaks without really meaning to. He’s got an acrid taste in his mouth that he’s only tasted a few times before - when he first saw his dad hit his step-mum, when he found Jack on the bathroom floor, and when he had to pull the Aces jersey over his head afterwards.

“It’s the new owner, isn’t it? That’s where this morality clause bullshit is coming from. He can’t stand the gay.”

Kent and the rest of the Aces had done a video for You Can Play a few years back, before he’d even told anyone in management. They’d had all these sensitivity seminars and had a professor come from the University of Nevada to talk to them about the social construction of gender and sexuality. They’d spent a day or two watching videos and documentaries on the Gay Liberation and Women’s Rights movements. They’d done it at the beginning of the new season, just like they’d done it every year since the first, it just turned out not to mean much in reality.

It had been the reason he’d ended up telling management, letting PR know that he was being careful but they should probably draw up some plans to be safe. He’d trusted them. He fucking trusted them. Now they’re still looking away. They can’t face him and he can’t keep the bitterness out of his voice when he laughs and continues:

“This is textbook discrimination. Fucking textbook. And I can’t even do anything about it because that would mean, not only would I have to come out and be the first gay NHL player, I’d also be the faggot crying discrimination because I couldn’t handle being traded. Nice. What was it you told us at sensitivity last week, Mark? Something about standing up for what’s right even when it might not be easy? You be sure to do that. I’m sure you’ll need to one day.”

Then he stands and leaves.

The hallways blur around him in a way he can only remember them doing when he was back in the Q, before he’d had therapy, back when he poured alcohol down his throat to pretend he wanted the world to look like that.

He moves into the locker room, silent, and then doesn’t speak - even as he’s clearing out his locker. Even as the voices of his team rain down on him in confusion and disbelief. He turns, gym bag over his shoulder, and sees the bright rainbow poster mocking him from where it’s pinned next to the door declaring ‘Think before you Speak. The LV Aces - Proud to Ally with the LGBT+ Community.’ He’d spoken about that poster in the interview he’d done this morning. Talked about how it was a small step his team was taking to help make the NHL a safer more inclusive space.

He’s not particularly conscious of deciding to do it but he’s ripping that poster off the wall and shredding it into pieces, breathing heavily. He can hear Swoops behind him start saying hesitantly “Ca- Parser, wha-” before he’s spitting on the pieces and heaving out a ragged:

“Fucking yeah right.”

Which is a hell of a way to come out to the rest of the team.

Which is a hell of a bombshell to hand anyone who has a grudge against him.

He doesn’t particularly care.

He can feel the intake of breath behind him. Hears Tracks mumble under his breath that “they fucking didn’t,” and then he leaves. He’ll text Swoops later, probably text Saints and Lands too. He just can’t deal with it right now. He can’t deal with their sympathy and outrage when he feels like he’s about to collapse.

Out in the carpark he can see reporters looking at him curiously as they make their way in. He can see them thinking that he should be in practice, wondering why he isn’t, wondering why he’s leaving. He gets into his car and starts driving, not really paying attention to the road. They’re probably already tweeting about it, his mentions are going to blow up and they don’t even have the big news yet.

Everybody knows he has a limited no-trade clause in his contract. Everybody knows that he loves the Aces and that he’s said publicly there is no force on earth that could compel him to choose to leave them unless he also has to leave hockey. Everybody has heard the rumours that he was a coke addict with Zimmermann who was forced into a top-secret rehab facility between the Draft and the camps. Everybody has seen the pictures leaked out of the Q where he was holding a red solo cup and listing against Jack’s shoulder. Everybody talked about the DUI he got after Epikegster ’14 and the community service the judge ordered he do as penance.

They’re all going to know the morality clause was triggered, no matter what spin the Aces and Schooners try and put on it, they’ll just think it was because -

His phone dings. A Facebook message from his step-brother reading:

‘Praying for you,’ with the link to a headline showing up just beneath that - ‘Party Parson Parties to Purgatory?’

Sports writers: they think they’re so funny.

With a sigh he gets out of his car, squares his shoulders, and resolves that when he gets to Seattle he’s going to be so deep in the closet that he’s having tea with Mr Tumnus on the regular.

 *** 

Jack makes it all the way to Seattle before he hears anything about Kent. Predictably, it comes in the form of a shouted question from the paparazzi. Equally predictably, it’s a derogatory interjection asking if he’s been “shooting up again with Parse?” Which was an odd sort of question to ask. There shouldn’t be rumours about Kent - he’s been squeaky clean since 2014. He didn’t stay out after two in the morning, or drink more than one glass of alcohol in public, and never went out to parties unless he was with the whole team.

Jack can’t focus on Kent though, he thinks about him too much as is. So he doesn’t say anything as he shoulders past the scrum and greets his new captain with a brief nod. They make their way to a waiting car and slip into the back, followed by cameras and questions, before Jack allows himself to actually pay attention.

Harvey Wickham - Sums to everyone except his small and indomitable mother - was signed out of the NCAA a year after Jack was supposed to be drafted. He’d graduated summa cum laude with a Math degree and made no secret out of his plans to study for a PhD in the future. He’d jumped through two teams before gaining a foothold in Seattle and rising up to the A within a season and the C a season after that.

“They sent a car because they thought something like this would happen and they didn’t want you to face it alone.”

He gives Jack a wry smile then leans forward and taps the driver on the shoulder.

“Can we swing through Starbucks? I’m parched.”

The driver nods, or at least Jack thinks he does, because Sums leans back with a satisfied smile before asking Jack for his order.

“My treat. I’ve got this whole spiel about how excited we are to have you here, which we are, and what a great bunch of guys we have on the team, because we do, but I know you probably don’t want to hear it. Getting traded’s rough, I know, so I won’t bother you with too much talk, but I did just want to say that I can put you up in my guest room until you find a place to get settled. If you don’t want to, that’s fine, just let me know.”

Then he focused on his phone, allowing Jack the privilege of quiet, only nudging him with his coffee before silence falls again. Seattle passes by outside and inside the radio is playing a pop song he’s sure he heard Bitty sing along to three days ago. He’d turned and flashed Jack a smile but even then Jack had known there was something wrong about it. It wasn’t too bright, or thin, or small - it simply seemed _off._ He’d thought it was because of the phone call Bitty had with his parents the night before but it was probably because the decision had already been made.

He didn’t like to think about himself as unintelligent but he should have seen the signs. He should have noticed when -

His car door opens with a snick and he startles. Sums is leaning slightly on the door he’s opened, grinning, and Jack slides out, red faced. Then he looks up and focuses on what he can see of the Ship - well technically the Anderson Arena. It’s a big glass structure, shaped vaguely like a ship (if he squints and tilts his head), that has the look of something designed by an architect after one glass of wine too many. It couldn’t be further away from the staid, slightly old-fashioned, Providence Centre he was used to. It looks, he thinks, like something Kent would like.

He’s played there, of course, but it’s different when you’re visiting. It’s different when, as you’re leaving, Poots is shaking his fist and yelling “- and fuck you too, you big ship,” or Tater is shouting glorious things about icebergs. The Ship was never something he paid particular attention to, just set decoration in his life.

He shakes his head and follows Sums into the depths and then up the stairs towards the offices which make up the business side of a professional hockey team. From there, Jack is shuffled from Legal (to go over his contractual obligations), to PR (“for some stock shoots, we’ll talk talking points in a bit”), to someone named Sierra (to take his measurements for his new uniform and give him a tour), and then into the boardroom.

Jack settles down next to Sums and joins him in frowning confusedly at Coach Hernandez and GM Van Jaarsveld who are huddling with Anthea from PR. Also in the conference are, Jack assumes, Assistant GMs, Directors, and Scouts.

“Huh, I thought the nerves would have ended when you touched down. They’ve been like this for the last two months.”

Jack turns to look at Sums and then back at the huddle. He’s already confused, he knows this isn’t the usual reaction to a successful trade, they should be all over him. Instead he’s sitting in the corner, ignored and unable to leave. Evidently just as perplexed, Sums turns to him and says:

“They should be happy? They traded Yves, Trim, and Hells - and I know there was some stuff to do with the Draft and the Farm Team as well. I just...”

It is that exact moment that Jack starts to realise that there’s something rotten in the city of Seattle. That’s not a normal trade to make for one player, not even Gretzky netted that. It can’t just be him being traded. Nervously he thinks about the shouted questions about Parse at the airport.

With shaking hands he opens his phone and heads to Twitter while out of the corner of his eye he sees Coach Hernandez straighten his suit and head out of the room. Unsurprisingly, he’s trending. Also unsurprisingly, so is Kent.

     Jeremy Winthrop @WinthropDeadspin - Party Parson Parties to Purgatory? http://d./nhl/934537

     Jeffrey Troy @TheSwoops - @ParseKV [gif - Don’t Let the Haters Stop You From Doing Your Thang] #gotyourback

     Rebecca Laslow @LaslowTweets - rumours spreading that @LVAces face a players revolt

     Colin Crews @JustCrewsing - @ParseKV shows his true colours again #parsewatch

     Georgina Hadley @GeorgiCorgi - OMG guess who @LasVegasAirport [image - Parson wearing a snapback and rolex, sitting on some oddly patterned chairs]

     Max Langford @LangfordShore - HAHAHAHA ofc @ParseKV is #traded couldn’t happen fast enough.

He turns off his phone with a sigh and a frown. If he’s right, and he really doesn’t want to be right, his life is going to get so much more difficult. Maybe he’ll be able to fly Shitty out to help him avoid a breakdown? He’s got to be wrong though. Yes, there were rumours that the new Aces owner wanted to put his stamp on the franchise but there was nothing about Kent. Not that he was being traded and not that he had gone off the rails. Not until, well, today.

Besides, Kent is the face of the franchise. He’s the reason why the Aces have fans after the team’s disastrous behaviour for the decade before the Draft. There is no reason why Kent would be -

Standing right there, in the doorway, Coach Hernandez behind him. For a split second there’s a horrified stare on Kent’s face, then he smooths it away with a smirk, gives Jack a polite nod, and slides into the seat on Sums’ other side.


	2. Chapter 2

****[Listen here!](https://www.dropbox.com/s/wnpf0x9a1abvm92/%5BCP%5D%20Whatever%20became%20of%20our%20youth%20%282%29.mp3?dl=0) ** **

***

Around them, the boardroom is quiet chaos. Sums is looking between the two of them nervously, furrows his brow, opens his mouth, and then decides against whatever he was going to say. The GM starts talking about how pleased they were to be able to pull off the trade and Kent tunes him out. He knows the drill.

Jack looks the same, which is just the cherry on top of a fucked up day. He could deal with it if Jack looked the way he did across the ice for the past four years - strong and determined. He could deal with it if Jack looked the same as he did before Kent fucked everything up in 2014 - smiling softly, at ease in every part of his body. He could deal with it if Jack looked the way he did in his Freshman year - stiff with his mouth in a thin line, held together by force of will.

The problem is that Jack looks the same as the boy he’d met in the Q.

_ In the background there’s a sharp, shrill whistle. He hears a thud and then laughter about coordination being an essential skill. Kent doesn’t notice. He’d missed the first week, struck down with the flu, and all attempts to skate through it had been met with firm resistance from first his billet dad and then his coach. _

_ He likes the Morrisons. They’re a strange family, their children take liberties that make Kent shiver straight down to the bone, and when Mrs Morrison teases Alice for being a bookworm, she’s greeted with an eye-roll and they both laugh. It’s fucking weird is what it is. _

_ Anyway, there’s a boy sitting a little way away from the rest, lacing up his skates. Kent hadn’t seen him yesterday, his first day back, but the sickly pallor of the other boy’s skin tells its own story. The boy has the bluest eyes Kent’s ever seen in his life, but that’s not what originally caught his attention. The problem is that they keep darting around, his shoulders are slightly hunched, and his fingers aren’t shaking but they look like they should be. _

_ “Oi, fatso! Get on the ice already. Or are you just so slow from all the dead-weight you’re carrying?” _

_ The boy ignores the team, gets up determinedly, and makes his way towards the ice. Kent feels a rock settle in his stomach as they boy skates across to the gate. He hates this, hates the gatekeeping and exclusion and bullying. Why can’t they just focus on the game? Then they’re playing hockey, they’re doing drills, and shooting at the goal and Kent comes to the conclusion that whatever they have against this boy, it doesn’t matter. He wants to make it to the big leagues, it’s an ache in his soul. A yearning that he feels from the moment he wakes up to the moment he falls asleep.  _

_ That means he needs to be friends with this boy, with his nervous eyes and crisp passes, more than he needs the rest of the team. He smiles and bumps his fist against the other boy’s shoulder when they step off the ice. He hates his smile, it’s slightly crooked and he can’t get it straight no matter what he tries (ha! Story of his life) but he gives it anyway. _

_ “I’m Kent,” he says and the other boy looks warily between him and the rest of the team. Then he pins Kent with a stare so sharp there’s nothing to do except be incredibly thankful he’s not planning to fuck with him. _

_ “Jack.” _

Kent blinks and focuses back in on the present. He can’t do anything about it and it’s not like Jack wants him in his life anyway. He’d made that perfectly clear.

The meeting wraps up and, at a nod from the GM, Sums guides Jack out, arm across his shoulder, while Kent waits.

Anthea finishes typing something on her phone, which appears almost instantly on his twitter feed (Seattle Schooners @SeattleSchooners - Press Conference at 5.30pm. You don’t want to miss this #grabspopcorn #allaboardSeattle) and focuses in on him.

She places her hands on the dark wooden table, and then drums her enamel fingers sharply once to get his attention. She stretches her red lips into a smile and speaks:

“Look, Kent, we don’t want to step on any toes here but you were only able to be traded here because you violated your morality clause. Now, I don’t want to know what it was, but I want you to know that we won’t stand for anything that could cause embarrassment for the team. So that means you do whatever you need to do to clean up your act - you do that and we’ll go out there and smooth it all over. You don’t, and we’re going to have some problems.”

There’s a cold humiliation crawling up his spine and suddenly Kent wants nothing more than to curl under the covers and sleep for eternity. He’d thought, he’d thought everything was fine. It was a sort of betrayal, the trade. A sinking knife into his heart that twisted, jagged and rough, with every moment he kept thinking about it. They’d told him he was still a valued member of the team, they’d told him everything was alright, they’d told him he didn’t have to worry. Then they’d completely fucked him over, and for what? 

Everyone knew trading a captain didn’t end well. Everyone knew trading someone of his calibre didn’t end well - he’s up there with fucking Gretzky and Crosby and Lemieux. That’s not bragging, that’s fucking objective truth. And yet, here he is. His ass shipped to Seattle and the reputation he’d worked so hard for shot to dust.

So he nods and promises that he’s cleaning up his act, that he is getting help, and then he goes through the rest of the Welcome to Seattle routine trying to ignore the bell in his head clamouring that it was all wrong.

He heads to the hotel room the Aces booked for him and turns on ESPN. He pulls out his phone to check the time - 5:22pm - then decides the smart thing to do is to turn it straight off. He grabs a pad of paper out of his bag, changes into some sweats, and then settles in to make a plan. Determinedly he starts writing down everything he has to do to settle into a new city and from there he starts making notes on everything he knows about every player on the Schooners.

ESPN cuts across to the Schooners Press Conference where GM Van Jaarsveld has seated himself next to Coach Hernandez with barely contained glee. Anthea, wearing a perfectly pressed midnight-black pant-suit, steps up to the podium and begins to speak.

“The Seattle Schooners are delighted to announce that we have acquired Jack Zimmermann from the Providence Falconers and Kent Parson from the Las Vegas Aces to join our line-up this season -”

Kent tunes her out, tapping his pen against his lip as he keeps drawing up his plan. He knows the Schooners only bid for him because they wanted the Zimmermann Parson no-look one timer, and he knows they think Jack’s the better acquisition. The fact that Jack got the Captain’s guest room and he got a hotel room and a lecture is pretty fucking clear. He might be stuck playing second-fiddle to Zimmermann again but he knows exactly how to win that game.

On screen the shock of the ‘Trade of the Century’ has worn off and Rebecca Laslow is trying to talk down James Copely as he rants about his former teammates “acting like children,” and not understanding that “hockey is a business, players get traded, sometimes the other team gets the better deal, suck it up.” Next to them, Harrison starts to question whether the Aces actually got the better deal - “Party Parson is back with a morality breach no matter how they spin it but, and I never thought I’d say this, at least the Schooners got Zimmermann out of it. He’s a strong, dependable type, and if they keep him on the straight and narrow it could be quite powerful.”

His eyes narrow, fists clench for a moment, then he smirks - hell hath no fury like a Parson scorned and the Aces have done so much more than scorn him.

They built a franchise on his back and the media said that sounded just fine. They demanded a nineteen year old boy, whose best friend had just attempted to commit suicide, pull together a fucking fractious team of players with an executive so inept they made Hogwarts look positively efficient. And he fucking did it, didn’t he? Oh sure, he partied too hard and drank too much but that was because of all the fucking pressure. 

That was because every news outlet, opposing player in a faceoff, or irate fan shouted that he was the understudy to the first round pick. That was because his first love, his best friend, had cast him as the villain in whatever fucked up script he was reading from. Then they took it all as given and excommunicated him like he was some second-century prince who fucked with the Pope. Yeah he knows his fucking history, so what? It’s not just Zimms who’s fucking smart.

What they’ve got coming? They deserve every second of it.

***

Jack’s on the phone with Shitty the instant he gets into the guest room at Sums’ house. He doesn’t care that it’s rude. He doesn’t care that Sums is hovering awkwardly - trying to understand the new dynamic on his team or be a good host, he doesn’t know which - he needs to talk to Shitty.

“Brah! Fucking rough of them to trade you, how you dealing?”

“I,” he says, then chokes out “Kent’s here,” and promptly starts hyperventilating. His skin is clammy, the room seems to be narrowing in on him somehow, and he’s finding it difficult to stay upright. Kent’s face is taking up all the space in his head, eyes narrow, mouth in that thin, diagonal line it gets just before he says something intentionally cruel.

Oh God, Kent had been right. He’d said, hadn’t he, to give it a few seasons. Give it a few seasons, hands balled into fists, stepping backwards and away while Jack was shaking apart at the seams. The words elongate in his head and he’s gasping. He can’t get away from the way they sound. He can’t get away from that stupid song about freaks or trumpets or something that had been coming up distorted from the floorboards.

“ - grab something to drink while I tell you about my day, Jack?”

The words are unexpected and it takes him a moment to understand what’s being said in his ear. He shakes his head for a moment and stammers out an affirmative. He fumbles through his backpack for his Gatorade and then he’s sitting on a bed that’s softer than he’s used to, focusing on the way Shitty drops his ‘r’s and elongates his vowels as he speaks.

Shitty had apparently started his day (“before the sun was up, brah, man was not meant to live like this”) working on gathering some files for a big torts case his firm is handling and then, inevitably, he starts to rail about the myth of litigation happy America and how it’s “fucking propaganda to maintain the existing hegemony.”

Slowly, Jack can feel himself come back from the tears he can’t control while his body vibrates for no good reason. He takes a deep breath, feels it spread through his body, and remembers the way Bitty had always showed up at someone’s house with baked goods in one hand and compliments spilling out of his mouth.  _ Most of us don’t get wined and dined, sweetheart, hospitality goes both ways,  _ he said afterwards, lying in bed next to Jack, trailing soft fingers up his arm, leaving a warm tingle behind.

“Thanks, but I’ve got to go, Shits. I’ve been uncomfortably rude. Talk to you later?”

There’s a laugh on the other end of the phone and then Shitty is agreeing and making him promise to call at a more appropriate time. He stands and looks at himself in the wardrobe mirror. He is obviously tired and overwhelmed but he can’t do anything about that. Not like his mother, who treated social functions like an acting role, who could look like she was having the time of her life then return home to pour a glass of wine she’d raise in a toast to “those boring oafs.” Not like Kent, who could have a hunted look on his face and then become the life of the party the instant the door opened. Not like Bitty, who approached socialising like he was going to war - bright smile and sparkling eyes painted on like armour.

He rummages in his suitcase and quickly dresses in slacks, with a blue button down shirt that he leaves loose at the top. His mother’s stylist had always dressed him in blue when they went out as a family and, it might have taken him a while, but he could take a hint. He brushes a hand through his hair, takes a deep breath, and opens the door.

He walks down the carpeted stairs, looking at the framed pictures on the wall. Sums, leaning against a short brunette, pointing at something he couldn’t see. Sums, lifting that same short brunette in the air, a blackboard reading ‘will you marry me’ caught falling to the ground. Two little girls, in denim overalls with their afro’s pulled up into buns, proudly displaying nets holding lobsters. An old man with white hair, standing in front of the sign for the Venice Biennale.

When he reaches the bottom, he turns the corner into a spacious living room. The two little girls from the wall are lying on the ground with sketchbooks and pencils spread across the floor. Just beyond them is a white marble kitchen island, decorated with a vase of yellow roses, and beyond that he sees Sums standing at the stove. He notes, almost without meaning to, that the oven on the wall next to him is a Subzero & Wolf. There’s a sharp stab in his chest, a memory of appliance catalogues spread on the Haus table flashing briefly in his head before he shakes it and clears his throat.

Sums turns, frowning, and Jack gives him a contrite smile.

“I’m sorry, that was rude of me. Can I help with anything?”

Sums’ eyes scan rapidly across Jack’s face then he relaxes, his shoulders unclench and he gives him a small nod. All is clearly not yet forgiven but things are looking up. Sums deputises him to supervise his daughters - Macey and Cammie - while he finishes cooking. Despite the smiles the two girls greet him with and despite Sums’ apparently relaxed attitude, he’s well aware that he’s being sized up.

_ Kids are just small, less self-conscious adults really, it’s not that hard once you understand that Jack _ , Bitty had told him after they babysat Marty’s daughter. Which was the problem - he didn’t know how to talk to other adults either. He supposed it was something that people learned how to do at school but he’d never done that. His edges had always been too sharp, his manner too reserved, his interests too different, and his talent too obvious to be anything other than a mini-dictator’s instant target.

The smaller girl looks up at him and gestures for him to sit. Which he does, awkwardly and without grace, then in a flash he remembers his favourite au-pair. She’d been a graduate student, perpetually carting around books and looking for highlighters, with a blue or black ink-stain migrating around her face and neck depending on the day. She’d been fashionably dressed of course, no one the Zimmermanns hired could be anything else, but she never looked like she stepped out of one of the magazines his mother kept on the coffee table. Most importantly, though, was the fact that she never took herself too seriously. She’d lasted six glorious months until his mother arrived home to find them blowing bubbles into chocolate milkshakes. He still wasn’t sure if it was the lack of decorum or the chocolate that served as her death-knell.

So, he gives the two girls a wry, conspiratorial grin, leans in and says:

“You’d never guess I’m an athlete would you?” Then he gives an exaggerated sigh of relief and watches as they start giggling. He leans forward and inspects their pictures, gives an approving nod, and asks if he can draw one too. Before long, he’s sprawled in an ungainly heap and sketching what he will later declare to be an abstract deconstruction of a tree while the two girls seriously discuss Postman Pat.

When they’re called to dinner (spaghetti and meatballs) and Sums gives him a small, approving, nod, Jack feels himself relax. Maybe things in Seattle won’t be too bad.

***

First practice is, in Kent’s humble opinion, a complete and utter clusterfuck. He’s not arrogant enough to take full responsibility - the Schooners did trade away three essential players on the first and second lines, after all - but he’s willing to admit that he played a significant role. Not that anyone apart from Jack, and maybe that far too shrewd fourth line player with the chipped tooth, would believe it.

Practice starts with their introduction to the team, Kent smiles self-deprecatingly and declares:

“I’d throw a party to say hi but...” and ducks when Chells - who’d been on the Aces back during the 2013-14 season - chucks a sock at his head as the others laugh.

Jack’s standing at his side, body held together in a rigid line, and when he introduces himself as “Uh, Jack,” then silently gets himself ready, the Schooners look at each other nervously. They keep inviting Jack to join in the joke, chirping him, leaving chirps half-finished so he can jump in, throwing him smiles, and nudging him with their bodies. They’re doing the same to Kent and he’s giving as good as he’s getting but Jack, Jack isn’t. Jack’s body is drawn tight and his mouth remains shut. 

Kent knows, because he knows Jack, that it’s nerves and an unfamiliar environment, but he knows that’s not what everyone else sees.

_ “Listen, I don’t deny that Zimmermann is a good, strong, player and that in a normal draft year he’d be first pick. In a normal draft year, his personality problems would barely make a dent, but this isn’t that year and if I was a GM I’d be thinking very carefully about whether I want a cold, arrogant, entitled, player to join my line-up or someone a bit more humble and personable.” _

_ “You know, I’m not sure about that, Trent. Yeah, he’s got the personality of a robot but he’s a legacy and he’s clearly the better player. Without Zimmermann, I’m not sure whether or not Parson would have been a contender for the first round and -” _

_ “But he is and he’s clearly giving Zimmermann a run for his money, proving that the first pick wasn’t his just because he was born, he actually has to work for it and, to flip your argument, I’m not sure that without Parson Zimmermann wouldn’t be -“ _

_ There’s a click and the screen goes black, Kent looks over his shoulder to see Gregs with the remote in his hand while Jack stands in the doorway with a drawn face. _

_ “There’s a bunch of us going down to McDonalds if you wanna join, Parser?” Gregs says, an explanation as much as an invitation, and Kent shrugs. _

_ “Yeah, why not? We’re going for the motherfucking Memorial Cup, might as well live a little.” _

Constantly, in the background of their first day, Kent can hear the same commentary he heard in the lead up to the Draft, given body and verisimilitude by the way he’s acting.

There’s a part of him that’s maliciously elated to see Jack struggle as practice goes on, as the others return the cold shoulder they believe he gave them. There’s a part of him that smugly rejoices as watching reporters start murmuring that Jack could have been poison in the Falconers locker room, PR notwithstanding, and that’s why they made the trade. There’s a part of him watching Jack draw himself tighter, pushing himself harder, that’s thinking meanly how much Jack must regret burning those bridges now.

But Kent’s been a little in love with Zimms since he first saw his face brighten as he spun to show him a book by John Merriman. Kent’s been a little in love with Zimms since the first night they broke into the rink and practiced till one in the morning. Kent’s been a little in love with Zimms since they curled up on his bed and watched  _ The West Wing _ , interjecting and debating passionately. Kent’s been in love with Jack for so long that he’s never been able to work out how to stop.

His therapist had told him it was because of his dad, because children like him clung to those they cared for tightly even as they left - too scared of being unloved and alone. His therapist said it was because of his dad, but Kent thought she said too many things were because of his dad. Maybe she was right and he’d never learnt to respect himself enough to leave when he was hurting more than he was happy. Maybe that’s why and maybe that’s fucked up but he doesn’t care. It’s Jack and it doesn’t matter why it is.

Which is why, when they’re about to head back onto the ice after break, he tries to help. He shoulders Jack and flashes him a smile then says,

“Loosen up, eh?”

Which turns out to be a mistake because Jack’s mouth is thinning and his eyes are flashing as he shoves him hard into the boards. There’s a sinking feeling in his gut and the only thing running through his mind is a constant stream of  _ oh fuck, I fucked up, fuck why do I always fuck up? _

“I didn’t mean - ” he forces out desperately as Jack rounds on him.

“You never mean!” comes Jack’s voice, sarcastic and furious all at once.

And then he’s properly angry. He’s tired of this fucking shit. Of being on the back foot and being blamed for what his half-sister, all of ten years old at the time, told him were perfectly logical emotions and feelings. If a ten year old could see that he was allowed to miss his ex, was allowed to be given the benefit of the doubt then why the fuck couldn’t Zimms?

“Fuck you!” he spits, shoving back at Jack “You think you’re so perfect all the time, huh? Well, someone perfect sure as hell wouldn’t have -”

“Wouldn’t have, wouldn’t have what? Seen you for what you are? Stopped letting you walk all over me? You’re a manipulative, sociopathic, two-bit social climber and -”

Then Sums is there, forcing himself in between them, pushing Jack back and Chells is grabbing onto his arm, pulling him away. He’s breathing hard, the red rage is receding and in its place is the cold emptiness, the crying in the privacy of his mind, the obsessive cataloguing of what he did wrong. He just wants to curl up in a ball, maybe eat some chocolate, and be left alone until he starts to feel steady again.

Chells is fluttering around like an anxious butterfly, looking between him and the rest of the team who are staring open-mouthed and starting to whisper. Coach Hernandez and his two assistant coaches are standing with clipboards at the entrance of the locker room, frowning in disapproval. Which is another thing to be worried about - he’s already on the shit-list, so now what? He should be analysing that in his head but Chells’ strong hands are steering him where he wants him to go.

_ Fuck _ is that really what Jack thinks of him?

***

As he’s led out of the locker room, he hears Hazza laugh nervously, high and weedy, then say “-just like riding a bike then?”

Next to him, Richy mimes an explosion with his hands and blows out his cheeks as he does so.

They turn a corner and then all Jack can see is the disappointed face of Sums framed by grey concrete as he stares at him. He shuffles his feet awkwardly and can feel his shoulders migrating upward, the way they always do when he’s feeling awkward. Then Kent is deposited there - pale as a ghost, a faintly distant look in his eyes - by a taller, bulkier man - Charles? Chester? Chaim? - who leaves him behind while sending Jack a death stare.

When Kent blinks and focuses on his surroundings, Sums starts to speak.

“Seriously?” he says, moving his hands out wide and forwards as if to say  _ you fucking dickwads  _ but feeling like that might be a step too far. “Sort your fucking shit out.”

Then he’s wiping his bruised hand across his face, sighing, and heaves out a broken, “Please?”

As he leaves Jack thinks he hears him mutter to himself, “I get enough of this from Macey and Cammie, I can’t deal with this at work too.”

Across from him, Kent still looks like he’s not completely present and Jack’s frowning, wondering and worrying. Then like a thunderbolt Kent’s suddenly there. His eyes are bright and his lips are curling up into a smirk.

“Well, that was fun,” he drawls, running a hand through his hair. “How are we gonna get the captain off our back?” He grimaces, “God, can’t believe I have a captain now,” and sends Jack a look inviting him to join in on the joke.

Jack’s not sure which way is up. Maybe he imagined it? Yeah, he must have been projecting.

He gives Kent a tight smile, reliving seeing Kent laugh bright and clear just before he turned his head and winked at Jack. He didn’t need to rub it in, that he was fitting in so seamlessly, while Jack was flailing.

Still, he remembers being the bigger person his first year as Samwell Captain, giving support and advice to juniors and seniors who’d joined in bullying him the year before. He remembers talking with his therapist about dealing with conflict in healthy ways. He remembers captaining little kids and looking down at them with stern maturity after a fight broke out, telling them that “it doesn’t matter who started it, it matters how you end it.”

The moms loved him.

So, he heaves out a sigh and then says, “We should probably talk, eh?” and watches as Kent stills like someone has pressed pause.

Kent’s face is as frozen as the rest of his body but his eyes are rapidly flitting from emotion to emotion: surprise, fear, grief, hope, trepidation.

“Sure, yeah. Where?”

That’s something he’s always liked about Kent. He’s refreshingly direct, no useless questions or confusing small-talk that Jack can never quite work out how to approach. Life doesn’t come with a playbook, yet everyone else seems to know the rules. Jack’s barely managed to eke out his own cheat sheet and he still seems to make the wrong call more often than not. He’s better when there’s someone with him to clear the way, set up the play, and let him make the goal.

He’s better with Bitty’s bright, effervescent, smile and genial manner, showing Jack where to go and what to say.

He’s better with Shitty’s boisterous largesse, bursting through every social barrier with such intensity that he seems completely functional in comparison.  _ He’s so normal, _ he can see them thinking,  _ not naked or course at all, such a polite young man. _

He’s better with Kenny, arm slung around his shoulder, one half of a pair. Sly smirks and dancing eyes, pointing out the chessboard he sees - predicting people like he predicts plays, pulling Jack along in his wake, and somehow looking like he’s the one being led.

He leads Kent out of the building, down side streets, and towards a small bakery he spotted when Sums took a meandering route to avoid traffic. Around four years with Bitty had taught him a lot of different things, and one of those things was how to measure a bakery by eye as easily as he measured flour. Jack’s got a really good eye for flour.

Kent’s looking sceptical as they make their way through the sepia-toned glass doors and into a dark wood panelled room. The tables are piled with pamphlets, baking trays, and delivery boxes. A young boy darts out from behind a beaded curtain to clear space when he sees them standing awkwardly, motions them to sit, and then brings them a menu. Kent raises an eyebrow in Jack’s direction but he’s not worried. The display cabinets are gleaming - cakes and tarts and mini-desserts artistically arranged inside - without even a fingerprint on the glass.

They sit awkwardly until their coffee comes - too sharp, bitter, and watery to even pass for good - and he watches Kent valiantly swallow the  _ told you so _ that wants to burst from his mouth. Then he watches Kent’s face as he has a divine revelation, biting into a small cheesecake and staring at the low ceiling as the mysteries of the universe unfold.

They eat in silence, then order bottled drinks, eyes meeting companionably as they agree that there’s no way they’re touching anything that isn’t baked at this place. Jack has no idea how to start, much less where. He doesn’t have to worry though, like always Kent leads the way. Kent’s fingers are tapping rhythmically against the glass he’s holding and then his mouth opens and the dam bursts.

“Look - I don’t know where I went wrong but I’m sorry, ok? I didn’t mean to, like, corner you or some shit, and my words come out and I hear them and they’re not what I meant to say and I know, I know, I should have given you space but... but... you were my world, Jack. I thought. Oh God, I thought things were good, I thought they were going well and I knew the press was saying shit but I didn’t realise, and then... and you wouldn’t talk to me and did I, did I make you do that? Because, God, Jack whatever I said, whatever I did, I didn’t mean it! I didn’t want that. I just want you to be happy and I’m so, so, so sorry and today I didn’t - I was trying - I thought I could help, I didn’t... Fuck, Zimms, you were my best friend, I just, I don’t understand. I don’t, I didn’t want to hurt you. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I miss you so fucking much and God, you fucking loathe me and I don’t know what I did. I really, I wasn’t using you Jack, I promise. I swear, I swear on... I swear on Kit’s life, Jack. I swear on Harmony’s life. I wasn’t, I didn’t...”

***

He’s sitting there, raw and exposed. He held his beating heart in his hands, raw and pounding, bleeding and sore, then lifted it towards Jack, like a supplicant to a deity. The trumpet has sounded for the seventh time, the march completed; the walls around his soul fell. Jericho is open; the conqueror can enter and plunder.

Jack’s sitting across from him, face like granite but that’s alright. His face isn’t his tell, never was, never will be. His shoulders are dropped and pushed slightly back while the rest of his body is coiled tightly together.  _ Surprised, processing _ , says the part of Kent’s brain that went rogue in 2008 and devoted at least ten-thousand hours to studying Jack’s micro-expressions and cataloguing them.

Then Jack’s mask cracks, crumbles, falls to the ground and Kent feels his heart stop and start again.

It’s going to be ok.  _ Fucking hell _ they’re going to be ok.


	3. Chapter 3

**[Listen here!](https://www.dropbox.com/s/pd4uhsnhgm6j0lj/%5BCP%5D%20Whatever%20became%20of%20our%20youth%20%283%29.mp3?dl=0) **

***

From the first second of the first warm up of the first game, Jack knows this season is going to be one for the history books. There’s been more airtime and column inches devoted to the  _ Trade of the Century _ than there was even before the Draft. The Aces player revolt is now inexorably tied into Kent’s trade although there’s been no official confirmation of that fact from either side. 

The stadium is filled to capacity, the fans cheering his name and Kent’s are outnumbered by Aeros fans champing at the bit. It’s not just Aeros fans, though, Jack can see one sign just behind a goal declaring “The Aeros are Assholes but we hate the Trade more” It’s not the only sign railing against a backroom trade that is seen as unfairly tipping the balance of the game in one team’s favour. Hockey fans of all stripes are there bearing derisive nicknames (Kiss-Ass Kent and Crack-Head Jack make the most frequent appearance) on signs and shirts and words on their skin.

The puck hasn’t even dropped yet and security has already broken up three fights in the stands.

“Holy shit,” he hears Hazza whisper around his mouthguard, “there’s going to be a fucking riot.”

Sums and Richy are standing off to the side, faces almost grey as they take in the energy in the stadium and the rabid expressions on the other bench.

There are two extra doctors in the med bay, a stretcher already hidden in the tunnel just out of view of the cameras.

Coach Hernandez doesn’t even try to prevent the inevitable:

“This is war, boys, protect your teammates, control the puck, and fuck them up.”

The roar of the crowd becomes deafening as they skate onto the ice.

The game comes in flashes.

First, the puck drops.

Then: an illegal check.

Someone’s tooth on the ice.

Goal.

Goal.

A fist in the face.

The boards rushing to meet him.

A high stick.

The puck sliding from Kent’s stick, to his, to -

Goal.

Medics on the ice.

Second Period.

His hand on a jersey.

Hazza slashes Perry.

Blood on the ice.

An empty net.

Goal

A full on brawl.

Sums circles around and passes.

Goal.

Grabbing a jersey and punching.

The penalty box.

Goal.

Kent blows a kiss at a booing crowd.

A helmet rolls on the ice.

The doors open.

Goal.

Third Period

Slapshot.

Goal.

Ice under his hands.

Pass.

Blood in his mouth.

Skin against his.

Goal.

Gordie Howe, take a fucking bow.

Game End: nine-nil.

Hazza was right, there is a riot. Afterwards, as they’re doing press - well, more accurately, he and Kent are doing press with intermittent commentary from the rest of the team - they’re hustled away to a secure part of the arena with thick walls and reinforced doors. From outside they can hear sirens and screaming. They turn on a small TV in the corner of the room and watch live coverage of fans going wild in the streets and venting their fury online.

Kent’s sitting on the desk next to him, feet swinging, cowlick going wild.

“I don’t think this has ever happened before,” he whispers, “a riot after the first game? What the hell, Zimms?”

He’s looking straight at him, searching for advice, but Jack’s got nothing.

As the hours pass and the riot shows no sign of ending, as commentators on the news start drawing comparisons to 1955, and his dad calls desperate to make sure that he’s ok, he feels the guilt rise. He should have been more conciliatory after the game, he should have been more humble before the game, he should have struck a more inclusive tone to mitigate PR’s narrative, he should have -

Something bumps against his shoulder and he turns his head. Kent’s staring straight at him, multicolored eyes focused and serious in a way he rarely allows himself to be in public.

“It’s not our fault, Zimms. This isn’t on us, we just played the game.”

He doesn’t quite believe him but it helps, so he nods. Then he looks back at the TV, at the rest of the team staring in shock, and he leans in close and whispers:

“They’re going to need us to say something, you know they will.”

Kent nods and pulls out his phone, pulling up his notes app and they pass it back and forward. They read Richard’s statement in ‘55, they read the statements the NHL put out in the wake of Cup riots, they read and write, and edit.

The riot enters its fifth hour and then the police are at the door, faces serious. They’re led to the press room where the bruised and smarting Aeros’ captain, Gregory Sutherfield, waits for them. His face is set as he accepts then reads a statement from his PR team urging unity and conciliation, press cameras snapping in overtime.

They check their phones but they’ve got nothing from their PR team so they pull out their own statement and read it. They talk up the Aeros’ performance, which was nothing short of abysmal but needs must, and emphasise good sportsmanship. They smile, shake hands with Sutherfield, camera’s flash, and Jack tries to feel like he isn’t apologising for getting traded.

It doesn’t work.

***

When the riots end and Kent is finally able to go back to the hotel room to sleep, he thinks things are pretty ok. He’s just won a game with Zimms at his side. He managed to make a professional impression in the press. He played a relatively clean game, all told.

When he wakes up, he finds out that he was almost completely wrong.

Management is upset that they didn’t wait for approval before reading a statement. (“It’s clear from the Aces behaviour in Vegas right now and your morality breach that you don’t work well with management, but you’ve got to learn, Mr Parson, or we can make your stay here very uncomfortable.”)

Sums is upset that they wrote a statement without consulting him. (“You couldn’t have even given me a heads up? That’s not fucking ok.”)

The Press is upset that he was too arrogant in the lead up to the game, exacerbated pre-existing problems. (“Parse is used to being a leader on and off the field, he should have acted like it and maybe we wouldn’t have seen the scenes we saw yesterday. A little humility, a little acknowledgement that he didn’t win the proverbial jackpot but that he’s still on probation, could only have helped.”)

He also wakes up to find multiple snaps from his fifteen year old half-sister, Harmony. The first is a video clearly filmed it as she was getting ready for school and saw footage of the riot. Text on the screen reads ‘ _ Oh my God, Kent are you ok? _ ’ as she records the news showing burning cars and flying bottles. In the background, he can hear his step-mother’s voice yelling  _ Harmony! Hurry Up, will you? _ He sends her a string of hearts because he figures she’s worked out he safe by now and then he shares photos of his bruises because, well, he’s a little shit that way.

As they make their way out to the bus and then back to Seattle, Jack remains glued to his side. He doesn’t talk much but he’s a silent shadow, passing Kent a book to read - Dominic Lieven,  _ Russia Against Napoleon, _ winner of the Wolfson Prize for History - and sharing his God-awful taste in music through a split headphone.

Over the next few weeks he cements himself on the team. Jack’s always hovering, of course, but he drags him to stand with Chells in the corner or nudges him to go talk to Hazza or a nervous rookie. It’s so similar to Juniors that he wakes up at 2am one morning in a cold sweat and has to check his phone for the date. Sure, Jack seems more stable, he initiates conversation with teammates that aren’t Kent, and he doesn’t find him breaking down in corners but he remembers his therapist telling him that he always needs to monitor himself and he worries.

He’s overheard Jack on the phone to his Samwell teammates becoming more and more recalcitrant about someone called Bittle. He’s noticed that the press is just as hard on Jack as they are on him. He knows the pressure is almost as bad as Juniors. He’s seen Jack sitting with his head in his hands on his bed as Alicia and Bob’s voices emanate from his phone’s speaker, telling him about how he should behave and what his next move should be to ensure that his name doesn’t become hyphenated like last time.

He goes through Jack’s bag the next time they’re on a roadie. There’s no alcohol and the only drugs he can find are non-addictive prescription. He checks the date on the pharmacist's label then carefully counts to make sure they’re all there. He wakes from dreams of Jack’s still body on the bathroom floor, vomit next to his mouth, skin clammy and pale. He wakes from dreams where Jack overdoses again but Kent’s 911 call gets connected to TMZ instead. 

He wakes and doesn’t calm down until he holds a piece of paper in front of Zimms’ nose and sees that it moves. It’s while he’s crouched next to Jack’s bed, holding that motherfucking piece of paper, unable to tell if it’s his shaking hands or Jack’s breath moving it, that he realises he should be more concerned about himself. He gets a referral to a therapist in Seattle.

Slowly, things get better.

In the meantime, he diligently follows the plan he sketched out in his hotel room that first night. He’s the life of the Schooners social life, dragging them from dinner party, to trivia night (where Jack cleans up), to karaoke bar. He sidles up to the rookies before Sums needs to step in as Captain and helps correct them. It’s not long before he’s called into a meeting with management where they tell him that they “appreciate how hard you’ve worked to put your former issues behind you” and his teammates tell the press that he’s “really someone you can count on, just - he’s a standup guy.” 

Fuck yeah, they could take the captain away from the title but they couldn’t take the captain from the man or some motherfucking shit like that.

He hasn’t told Jack, he hasn’t told anyone, why he was traded from the Aces. The way his bag is slightly ruffled when he comes back from a dinner with Chells tells him Jack had been just as concerned about Kent as he was about Jack. The Schooners, on the other hand, prefer to leave him alone to process - he’s adjusting and that’s all that matters. As longs as he doesn’t pull that shit with them (whatever that shit was), they won’t intervene. 

Instead, they play game after game, facing off against players salivating for glory and gore, bloodying up hockey’s Prodigy Pair. Instead, they pile out to bars and clubs to let off steam and stabilise before the next one. Instead, they draw themselves tighter together, petty squabbles ignored in the face of overwhelming hatred.

It doesn’t become a problem until they’re on a roadie to Las Vegas for his first game against his old team and he remembers how he left. He’s in the visitor’s locker room of his old arena - eight weeks after he was traded, six weeks into the season proper - with a rising tide of terror and no one to turn to for help.

***

Something’s wrong and Jack doesn’t know what it is or how to fix it. Kent’s quiet, which would be cause for concern in and of itself but he’s just sitting there, staring almost vacantly into space, chewing on the necklace that he only wears on game days. Jack hates feeling helpless, hates it when he can’t make things better for the people he lov- the people he cares about.

They file out onto the ice before he’s adequately processed whatever the hell it was he’d just thought and worked out how to approach Kent.

The puck drops and unlike every other game so far this season, it isn’t violent. There are no illegal checks, no homophobic chirps, no snide mentions of the Q, no derogatory references to drugs or overdoses, no slashes or high-sticks, and no fights instigated by an Ace. The refs skate around, practically defunct.

Jack’s as confused as the rest of the crowd.

They’d come to the arena expecting to see one of the more violent and aggressive games of the Schooners 2019-2020 season and those games were already more brutal than the norm. More brutal, even, than the season every other team is having. Jack’s new team is giving the Penguins a run for their injury money, is leading out the table for most fighting penalties, is playing and scoring against the Powerplay more often than not. ‘The Aces Face Off Against Party Parson,’ the tabloids had crowed. Betting agencies were running odds not just on who would be injured, but for how many games they’d be out.  _ Going to watch the boxing tonight, no, wait, I meant hockey _ one fan had tweeted just before they arrived.

When one rookie starts to make a vaguely antagonistic move towards Kent, Jack watches with a gaping mouth as he’s violently checked against the boards by his teammate - Tracks? - who makes an exaggerated oops face, helps him up and gives him a thorough pat down which seems more like he’s hitting him than being solicitous.

They don’t play any less hard, don’t make the game any easier, which makes everything even more unfathomable. The only person who seems to have any clue about what’s going on is Kent. His reaction vacillates between being outraged and blank faced. By the end of the game, after some of the Aces had made a few more attempts to play hockey the way it was usually played, but had been repeatedly shut down by their teammates, Kent’s thin lips and clenched fists suggest he’s settled on fury.

PR makes the decision to keep Kent far, far, away from the Press and send Jack instead.

He thinks that means they’re still upset about how they handled the riot. He spends an excruciating thirty minutes justifying their victory and attempting to explain one of the most absurd games of hockey he’s ever played as being a “mark of respect to an old captain,” when everyone knows you respect your old captain by bashing and chirping the shit out of him.

After he’s finished press, showered, and cleared up his locker he starts to make his way out of the arena. It’s late and he assumes he’s alone, until he hears the shouting.

“ - the fuck, were you playing at, huh?”

“We were trying to play a motherfucking clean game you -”

“A clean game? A  _ clean _ game? That wasn’t a fucking clean game! That was -”

That’s definitely Kent’s voice and his tone is firmly in the zone that means he’s about to launch a verbal volley which punches straight to into the other person’s soul, ripping his own out in the process.

Jack starts to walk faster, trying to locate wherever the fight is by sound. Not far, it turns out.

“ - think for one measly second that maybe it would be fucking offensive as fuck to assume that I couldn’t fucking handle -”

“What the hell, Kent? It wouldn’t have been a fucking regular -”

He rounds the corner to see Swoops standing across from Kent, face red and body a rigid line of tension. Kent’s body is drawn just as tight, his hands clenched into fists, but the lines on his face register in Jack’s brain as betrayed _. _

“I thought you were better than that, except it turns out that you’re nothing more than a -”

Jack throws his interjection like a lifeboat into the water.

“Kent, hey, I thought we were going to dinner?”

He watches as they both startle and Swoops shrinks back. Kent turns to look at him, brow furrowing in confusion, and then Jack brings his arm is around him and he’s leading him away with a polite and genial nod to Swoops.

They make their way to the hotel room in silence and then Kent erupts.

He lets out a soundless scream of rage, grabs a pillow, and starts throwing it onto the bed over, and over, and over until he collapses boneless to the ground and heaves out gulping sob after gulping sob.

Jack stands in the background, hovering, unsure, until Kent starts to settle and only then does he slide down next to Kent on the floor. There’s a part of him that’s expecting Kent to start talking, to curl up in his lap and run his fingers up his arm while he says what’s bothering him. That’s the part of him who spent years with Bitty. Bitty, who would clam up and hold everything inside and only once Jack had coaxed him far enough would everything spill out. Bitty, would be clutch Senõr Bun, or whisk pie filling, or cling to Jack’s skin while he told him everything he felt.

Except that’s not how Kent works, that’s never been how Kent works. Kent has always been the one who climbs out the window late at night after one of their teammates called him a kiss-ass to go and scream at the ocean. Kent has always been the one who takes out his anger at himself in the way he plays his games, recklessly and without any care. Kent has always been the one who slings an arm across Jack’s shoulder if they were fine, or around another teammate if it wasn’t.

Instead, Kent nudges him with his shoulder and walks over to his laptop. He turns slightly, narrows his eyes and tilts his head, then nods decisively.

“Zimms, you probably missed this and you’re going to love it.”

Jack feels lighter, then, because this means Kent isn’t angry at him. Didn’t think “God, why can’t you just back the fuck off, Zimms? I’m ok alright!” because he followed him into his room and didn’t tell him that “I can deal with my own fucking shit I don’t need you mothering me, Christ,” for getting him out of there in the first place. The angry, self-destructive boy in his head, who spit those words at him in the Q and similar words at Samwell is still there, he can see him in Kent’s tight shoulders and clenched firsts, but he’s not in control. 

Kent’s connected his laptop to the TV with a black wire of some sort and he’s navigating across to a folder labelled  _ Totally Legal Shit _ and clicking on a video that Jack doesn’t quite catch the title of. He turns off the lights and settles back down next to Jack with an expectant look on his face. The black screen shakes wildly and audio emerges slightly tinny with rustling in the background -

“ _ How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore -“ _

Jack’s enthralled.

***

Kent wakes up to find that a lot of people tried to contact him while he was unconscious. His heartbeat rises until he notices that most of the texts are variations on the theme of ‘oh God why did you introduce Zimmermann to Hamilton?/it’s been 84 years/did he seriously just find out?’ or long texts from Jack delving into historiographical debates and generally nerding out.

He wonders how everyone found out so quickly but then he sees that both Jack and Lin Manuel Miranda are trending, apparently Jack had found a kindred soul in someone who considered an eight-hundred page historical biography of a founding father beach reading. Evidently, Jack had tweeted his excitement and praise instead of DMing it, which really shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone but somehow still did.

At least PR is probably happy; it’s got to be the only time DM vs Tweeting confusion ended up in their favour.

They make their way from the hotel room and Jack is still leaning in towards Kent with words spilling from his mouth as he talks about Hamilton. He doesn’t stop on the bus, he doesn’t stop when they get on the plane home, and he doesn’t stop while they’re in the air. Kent knows he should be irritated, he can hear Hazza start discussing the potential institution of fines, but he can’t tear his attention away. Jack’s eyes are bright and sparkling, his voice sounds infinitesimally younger (as it always does when he is excited and happy), and he’s tripping over his words,  reversing back to finish a point, and then darting forwards again.

When they separate in the car park of Sea-Tac, Kent turns his head and sees Chells standing behind him looking between them with a speculative expression on his face. His heart sinks like a stone.

_ The door slams as he walks briskly through the hotel lobby, frustrated tears start spilling down his face. He wipes his arm across his eyes to try and clear them. God damn it, he can still feel sticky alcohol on his body which doesn’t help anything. _

_ “Hey, Cap!” _

_ Chells is leaning up from one of the many couches scattered artistically in the room. His red hair is askew, a stripe pressed straight across his nose and down his right cheek from where he’d clearly been pressing it against a pillow. His bright expression falters when he sees Kent’s face. _

_ “Oh, hey, hey, Cap, we did good yeah? Don’t look like that.” _

_ Kent shrugs and waves him off as he makes his way to the elevator. _

_ The next morning Kent sees Chells staring at news coverage of him at a college party, in Samwell, completely befuddled. Then he frowns and something noticeably dawns on him. He wanders over and gives Kent friendly punch against his shoulder before saying: _

_ “You’ve got better friends now, eh,” which explains exactly what he thinks he figured out.Which, the guy has a point but he actually knows fuck all. _

Heteronormativity covered his ass then, just like it’s covered him every time before and since. It hadn’t failed him when he’d been a touch too confused after Lands started waxing poetic about womanly beauty. It hadn’t failed him when he’d drunkenly stumbled away from Sheik and Schnaps when they dropped him home and picked up Kit, declaring that she was “the only pussy for me.” It hadn’t even failed him that time, oh two weeks ago, when he’d gone on a passionate rant in a radio interview about how personally important the You Can Play initiative was to him; he’d just been lauded for being an outstanding ally.

He didn’t think his body language was any different to any other time he’s failed to be perfectly straight, but Chells has more of the pieces than anyone else on the Schooners. Something about his time on the Aces and the things he’s seen since the Trade mean that motherfucking  _ Hamilton  _ was the final connection he needed to solve Kent. Hell, he might even have heard some of rumours spreading inexorably from the Aces locker room. That would have fucking helped him along.

Chells ambles towards Kent, throws his arm around his shoulder and gives him a playful nudge.

“Well,” he says before he’s quelled by Kent’s glare.

He pauses for a moment, then nods decisively.

“I’ll meet you at yours then?”and walks away before Kent can say anything.

He makes his way towards his car in a sort of daze. Not quite as detached as he was when he left Vegas but close. He opens the door with a snick and then sits. His hands are resting on the steering wheel, ten o’clock and two o’clock: a suboptimal position. The face of his watch reflects onto the little strip between seats and he watches for a moment how it moves as he twists his arm to and fro, up and down. He breathes.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

Then he lifts his hand from the steering wheel and turns the ignition.

For the first time in his life, he’s only driving. No music, no plays running in the back of his head, and definitely no sports radio stations coming through the speakers. There is nothing else in his mind but one hundred percent focus on the road and ensuring he stays safely on it. Nothing exists outside the car, nothing exists before the car, nothing exists after the car. It should scare him, he thinks briefly at the traffic lights, that this is the only way he knows to make sure his brain keeps him alive at times like this - tricking it into forgetting any reason not to be alive exists.

He parks in the garage, waves his pass to make the lift go up to his penthouse suite, steps into the small safety room between the lift and his locked front door, and then he allows himself to start breaking; to start feeling everything he’d repressed on the way home.

He opens the door, steps through, and is automatically greeted by Kit twirling around his feet, loudly expressing at once her joy at his return and distaste that he ever left. He picks her up and breathes in the odd fresh-dusty smell that’s unique to cats, cradles her squirming form to his chest and makes his way to the bedroom.

He drops Kit on the ground, steps out of his shoes and onto the soft slightly springy carpet, pulls off his public clothes, slips into a loose t-shirt with jeans, then stares at the full-length mirror at the back of his walk-in wardrobe.

“God fucking damn it,” he whispers as he watches his reflection in the mirror. He looks small, cowed, and his mercurial eyes are staring back at him with so much fear and resignation that he forces himself to look away. 

He walks back through his bedroom, picking up a discarded book from the floor as he goes, and then flicks the kettle to boil in anticipation.

Chells isn’t going to be much longer.

He doesn’t think Chells is going to be a dick about it, but the fuck does he know? He’d thought that about the Aces and, well, when it was profitable for them they hung him and their ethics out to dry. So, yeah, Chells might be vocally supportive of You Can Play, might have shut down homophobic or transphobic chirps in every locker room he shared with him, and might have a grandmother who married her best friend, but that might not mean anything. It might not mean anything in the face of having his Captain firmly under his thumb: blackmailed and pliable. Chells could ask for anything and Kent would do it to stay in the closet.

If he thought coming out was going to bad before this season, he was naive as fuck.

The rumours had been percolating through the league, he can tell who’s heard and what they believe by how they treat him on the ice.

Aggressively normal: heard the rumours, didn’t believe them.

Normal but hesitant: didn’t hear the rumours, wonders why everyone’s being weird as fuck.

Actually normal: a sweet, oblivious, summer child.

Wary and unpredictable: heard the rumours, believed them, is slightly bothered but also bothered that they’re bothered.

Aggressively unpredictable: take a fucking guess.

He doesn’t know how the rumours haven’t made their way into the Schooners locker room yet; he heard from a friend on the Aeros that there are already mock up tabloid pieces with on the record quotes ready to run the instant there’s enough evidence to cover the inevitable lawsuit.

He rocks back on his heels, feels the cold hardwood under his feet. Yeah he’s a hypocrite but, like, it’s not in his bedroom in the middle of the fucking desert, so he gives himself a pass.

There’s a buzz from the intercom and Chells’ voice comes through, slightly tinny, asking to be let up.

He waits, leaning against the doorframe, watching the numbers on the lift decrease then increase.

Time elongates.

He thinks it was the  _ Theory of General Relativity _ that talked about how time isn’t static, how it isn’t constant, that attempts to accurately measure its passing are as futile as caging the sea.

It sure as fuck feels like Einstein was right.

The doors open.

He’s enveloped in the warmth of a six-feet and two foot of red-headed bruiser hugging him tightly, whispering:

“Don’t worry, Parser, don’t look so pale, eh? It’s gonna be ok, you’re gonna be ok.”


	4. Chapter 4

**[Listen here!](https://www.dropbox.com/s/onm4e67pf94r425/%5BCP%5D%20Whatever%20became%20of%20our%20youth%20%284%29.mp3?dl=0) **

***

Montreal spreads beneath Jack, glistening lights and snowy streets. He’s high up enough that the people and problems below seem manageable and small. The problem is that he’s descending, working his jaw because Kent isn’t with him to share bubblegum, and everything is looming ever larger.

Christmas and the NHL’s begrudging break came faster than he thought it would. God, he hates Christmas. Every year it’s a dose of forced happiness where showing that he’s upset or nervous or just not into an obnoxiously commercial holiday is somehow an attack on everyone else. _Show some Christmas spirit!_ people say, as if Christmas is some wonderful time of the year for everyone. As if he owes them his happiness, never mind his personal feelings or hang ups.

The plane touches the ground with a slight bump of the tail - engineers will have to check that out - and he sighs. At least when he was together with Bitty he had an excuse to miss the pilgrimage home and meet at a more thematically neutral and less emotionally manipulative time. Now, there was no reason not to come.

He passes baggage claim, his parents house has everything he needs, and notices that his parents are waiting for him surrounded by paparazzi. He hates seeing himself photographed, he hates seeing those photos analysed, and he hates what he has to do so that they don’t hate him as well.

“Papa, Maman,” he greets with a smile, allowing himself to be hugged and kissed and doing the same in return.

His dad takes his carry on and they make their way to the car. His mother is as elegant as ever, even though she’s dressed down in slacks and a sweater with her hair loosely over one shoulder. The ensemble drips of expense and hours preparing but from the comments he can hear, Jack knows everyone’s completely taken in - that’s Alicia Zimmermann, effortlessly elegant and perfectly poised. Score one for his family’s PR team.

“Oh, darling, I’m so glad to see you,” his mother’s saying as he gets into the backseat. Montreal passes outside the windows as she talks about how glad they are to see him and how healthy he’s looking and how they’ve made sure that his Christmas dinner will still fit with his diet plan and how excited they are for the party that evening -

Jack sinks down lower in his seat. Great, socialisation with no warning. He wants to scream and never stop screaming.

At the Wellness Centre, where he spent three months, they’d worked with his parents to ‘change his environment’ and help ‘minimise the risk of recidivism.’ They’d tried, of course, but his parents were the It couple of Canada. They had events and friends and meetings with politicians, boards of directors, actors, and CEOs. They had obligations which couldn’t just be dropped and, eventually, they convinced themselves it was the press and the Draft that did it.

Nothing to do with them.

Nothing to do with the hours he spent drilling on the ice with a perpetually unimpressed father.

Nothing to do with the health and exercise regimen he was put on when he was a bit more big boned than socially acceptable.

Nothing to do with the PR training he’d been forced to take since he was a child, or the weekly evaluations of how he was represented in the press, nothing to do with the way they pruned back every interest he showed but hockey because _obviously_ that’s where he was heading, Jack just loves to skate.

He loved history and teaching, too, but somehow that didn’t matter as much.

His dad takes over when they leave Montreal and start their drive through through the countryside. It’s spread wide and untouchable, cold and empty,  as Bad Bob Zimmermann talks about his P/M stats before and after the trade, how Jack can improve his faceoff, and how to manage his publicity better.

When they arrive at the Zimmermann Mansion (“understated, highlighting excellent taste in interior and exterior design, the perfect blend of functionality and artistry.” - _Style at Home_ , 2010), his dad thumps him on the shoulder and tells him he:

“Better go get ready, eh.”

Jack escapes gratefully darting up the stairs, past the Gustav Klimt, past the indoor ice rink, and past his old room. He makes his way to the back of the house, closer to the staff area than his parents are completely comfortable wandering, and then into the small room he chose after the Draft. He did it up in a light brown, placed tea lights on the bookshelves, and decorated with posters showing a list of Roman Emperors, the election of Kennedy, and a map of the D-Day invasion. None of the books on his shelves, or pictures on his wall, have anything to do with hockey.

He makes his way over to the mirrored closet and looks at the picture of Bitty he’d pinned up the last time they visited. It’s a candid he took in his Providence kitchen the second summer they were in love, Bitty is laughing down at a bowl of dough he’s kneading, the sun is glinting off his hair, and there is a glimpse of a hickey peeking up from his collared shirt. He’d just made a joke, he can’t remember what of, and he’d thought to himself, _God I’m in love with this man._

He wondered when that changed, when exactly they slipped from a relationship into a close friendship. He wondered when they stopped pushing each other, when they simply minimised and hid anything which could inconvenience the other. There was never anything out of place, everything was neatly tidied away as soon as it was used, and it felt like stepping into a magazine spread instead of a home. There were no passionate debates or fights that ended with changed minds, only quiet conversations and rambling about topics that the other person couldn’t do much more than listen to. He wondered when they stopped talking and started co-existing.

He wondered when Bitty noticed.

He wondered why he didn’t.

He curls up on bed with an Eric Hobsbawm book, intermittently messaging Shitty who was spending his Christmas with Lardo and no vacation time until Christmas Day itself ( _“They’re trying to fucking kill me, brah_ ”).

Too soon, it’s time for the party and he gets dressed in an Armani suit from his wardrobe, picks out a purple tie instead of a blue one as an act of defiance, and makes his way to the ballroom. Yeah, his parents have a ballroom. A gorgeous ballroom, done up with mirrors and gilt with just enough gold to show their wealth and still have class.

The party is in full swing when he gets there, and he’s passed from guest to guest, forced to smile while they talk about the Trade.

“It was a fucking coup, no warning, no indication,” grumbles GM Barry from the Aeros as Jack stands there listening politely.

“Broke our agreement,” says Uncle Wayne, who explains when he notices something confused in Jack’s face. “You weren’t supposed to end up on the same team, we all knew it would skew too heavily in one team’s favour if that happened, and none of us wanted that.”

“No one wants to watch a game where the outcome’s a given,” says Uncle Mario, with an aggrieved look in Wayne’s direction.

The outcome’s a given, yeah right. Tell that to the games they lost and the hours upon hours they had to work. He and Kent had to put in so much extra time getting used to each other, practicing with each other, forgetting or adapting what they learnt on their previous teams. They had to teach what they learnt to Sums and have him feed that information through to the rest of the team so they didn’t undermine him. They had to cry and scream and they had to spend days in each other’s company, simply so they could work past the decade of resentment and misunderstanding they’d both cultivated.

He slips to the edge of the room, unnoticed as his family and family friends flitter around. Just through the crowd he can see his mother smiling, her hand on the arm of the Prime Minister’s wife. Closer to the middle of the throng stands his father, head thrown back in boisterous laughter as he gestures, champagne flute in hand.

It’s too much.

The conversation is too loud, there are too many people, the lights are too bright, and the smell of perfume is too cloying in his nose. Everyone seems to be too close and moving too fast. The dancers are spinning, the waiters moving through with champagne flutes, hors d'oeuvres, and closed off faces. The carols are starting to irritate him, and he can’t find anything to focus on - there’s just too much happening. His heart rate is escalating, he’s breaking out into a sweat, and he just knows if he said anything he’d be told to take one of his pills.

Except it’s not his anxiety; it’s overstimulation. The pills won’t help. Instead, he stays silent and slips silently out of the hall and down into the kitchens. He sits quietly in the corner, watching the staff work like a particularly well oiled machine - slice, cook, plate - and feels his heart rate steady.

Then his hands are clutching at a mug of hot chocolate and he smiles up at Josephine, older now, with crows eyes and laugh lines spreading from the corner of her mouth. She taps his head lightly, opens her mouth to speak and then notices one of the waitresses almost knock into her sous chef. She gives him an apologetic smile and dashes off to berate them.

The chocolate is smooth and rich, spilling down his throat and warming him up from his feet. There’s love in it too, love that’s wrapping around him and enveloping him, because she’s in the middle of orchestrating the Zimmermann Christmas Party and she still took the time to make it for him and check that he was alright.

Coming home isn’t all bad.

***

Fucking Christ, but Kent would love to punch his dad in the face. Or whack him with something hard and spiked. Or push him over a cliff. He hides in the bliss of that thought for a moment before focusing back in on his phone.

The Uber app is confusing as fuck to navigate, but he doesn’t have a choice. He has to pretend to be Vincent Priestly (yeah he’s fucking punny) and book a car to meet Harmony during her lunch break. He uses the same identity to book plane tickets. If he used anything tied to his real name, there’d be articles and speculation and then his entire family would know. They really couldn’t find out until -

Chells nudges him and gestures to the ice and he notices that the team is staring at him in frustration. He wonders how long they’ve been waiting. One apologetic shrug later he’s practicing, for a given fucking value of practice. His shots aren’t going where they should, his passes aren’t connecting, and he keeps zoning out to look over at his phone on the bench.

They break for lunch and then Coach Hernandez yells,“Don’t bother to come back until you can fucking focus, you’re bringing the whole team down.”

He should be concerned about that, should apologise and forget everything but ensuring he doesn’t get traded again. Except he can’t. So he dashes out with a, “Sure, Coach, thanks, Coach,” leaving Jack and Chells behind with worried faces.

He spends the rest of the afternoon and early evening on the phone with his lawyers, forwarding screenshots of the texts he’d received over Harmony’s winter break, making sure that having just turned sixteen she can choose where to live; she can’t, but they’re confident they can win if the rest of their family causes any trouble.

He empties out the guest room, calls his favourite Thai restaurant to make sure they’ll have food for him to pick up on the way back from the airport, ignores the worried messages on his phone and the article speculating that he’d drunk too much the night before to focus on his hockey.

He’s five years sober, but it’s not like anyone cares.

Then, he’s dashing down to his car and speeding out of the garage, slowing down once he realises she’s not going to arrive any quicker and he really can’t afford any more bad press. Not now, not with this.

The domestic arrivals gate isn’t generally a place anyone expects to see a celebrity without warning, but that doesn’t stop the whispers from going around or the photos being taken. It’s not long until twitter alerts him that paparazzi are waiting outside, and that he’s trending.

He couldn’t care less; at least whatever his face is doing is deterring autograph hunters.

He sees the plane pull in and he waits fidgeting, fingers tapping against his pants, for the crowd to emerge. Harmony’s one of the first to leave, first class perks he supposes, and he exhales in relief before tensing again in anger. She changed from her school uniform at some point on the plane and he knows there was no reason to do that except for this: the photos that are being snapped by everyone in the terminal and the photos that will be snapped when they make it to the paparazzi outside.

It’s too cold for her outfit, it shows too much skin, but that’s the point of course. There are bruises in the shape of handprints on her upper arms, coloured skin and cuts on her legs. Those marks would have been covered in uniform, they aren’t now - on display and telling a clear story. He fucking hates everyone in his family except for her. He hates his sanctimonious step-brother, hates his violent father, hates his complicit step-mother, and he hates everyone who raised them to be like that.

When she sees Kent, Harmony lets out a sob and lunges desperately at him.

Clever girl.

She never cries unless she’s alone.

He passes her his jersey and she pulls it on gratefully, then they walk through the gauntlet of press outside with his arm around her shoulder and her pressed into his side. It’s only partly for show.

They spend the rest of the night blasting Britney, eating Thai, clutching each other and crying. She curls up in bed next to him, unwilling to let him out of her sight, and it’s past midnight when they finally slip, exhausted, into sleep.

_“You have to help me! They’ve gone insane!” there’s the sound of someone screaming in the distance and he can hear her terrified breathing echoing like she’s locked herself in the bathroom. She lets out a hysterical giggle, “They got my report card, I didn’t do so good.”_

He wakes with a gasp and reaches desperately to touch Harmony, just to make sure she’s safe and whole. He stretches and makes his way to the kitchen instead of closing his eyes again. He’s not going to get any more sleep. He thumbs through his phone as he makes his coffee and notices that it’s filled with twitter alerts, Facebook notifications, and texts from pretty much everyone in the Schooners.

Coach Hernandez apologised for his strong language at practice but “it would have been fucking nice of you not to be a dipshit and actually talk about what was fucking wrong. I better see your ass at practice.” The sentiment was appreciated.

Sums informed him that the team will do “whatever is necessary to help you, just ask.”

Lands texted him that he’ll “fuck up whoever fucked up Harmony, they’re fucking bastards,” - a sentiment echoed by Chells, Saints, Swoops and every other former or current teammate who used his number.

Jack’s the only one who knows for sure who did it and he’s texted “Fuck ‘em, you both deserve better. Call at anytime and I’ll come, I mean it Kenny, whatever you need, whenever you need it.”

He decides to take Jack up on that offer and, despite the bleary and slightly scratchy voice Jack answers the phone with, he promises to arrive within the hour.

Forty minutes later he’s staring at Jack, eyes wide and body shaking as he clutches at his hair and words spill desperately from his mouth:

“I don’t know how to do this, Zimms. I don’t - there’s so much I have to - They’re going to fucking crucify me, Jack - I can’t, I can’t -”

Then there’s a strong arm around his waist, leading him to his lounge room. There’s a cup of coffee pressed into his hand. There’s a blanket wrapped around his shoulder. There’s a hand rubbing up and down his back and a voice telling him:

“It’ll all work out, Kenny. I got you, ok?”

He’s staring up into crystal blue eyes which are steady, reassuring, and overflowing with warmth. He relaxes into the arms coming up and enveloping him, noticing some of the tension leave his spine. Jack’s there and he promised to help. He woke up and came to his house at four in the morning. He woke up and came to his house at four in the morning for no reason other than Kent asked.

There’s a stack of papers on the coffee table, he notices once he’s calmed down. There’s a stack of papers covered with sticky notes and scribbled comments. He leans over and picks them up and finds information about custody disputes, information about good schools in the area, information about therapists he can hire, information about what he can reasonably ask the press to do and -

There’s just so much information.

He turns his head to look at Jack. His shoulders are hunching and there’s a red flush spreading up from his neck and across his face but his eyes are determined as he stammers out:

“I thought... I thought you probably didn’t have enough time to look properly so... I...”

He shrugs and gestures at the paper as if it explains everything and yeah, it kind of does.

***

The sun rises while Jack’s still sitting in Kent’s living room. Kent’s seated cross-legged on the floor, twiddling a pen between his fingers, one hand running through his hair, as he works through the pages and pages of information Jack had printed out last night.

He doesn’t think Kent’s even thinking about practice or breakfast.

He frowns, wondering, then decides that since he hadn’t overstepped in printing that information in the first place, he won’t overstep if he uses the kitchen to make them food. He’s still rummaging through Kent’s unorganised drawers - he found the bread knife in the same drawer as the strainer - when he senses someone staring at him. He freezes, egg carton in hand, and turns.

Harmony’s leaning in the doorway, a tilted, wry smile that’s the image of her half-brother’s on her face as she looks at him. Her blonde hair has been pulled back into a ponytail and she’s wearing one of Kent’s Aces shirts that’s slightly rumpled from sleep. She looks worse in front of him than she did in the lurid photos splashed online last night, her eyes are sadder than he remembers them being before and the bruises, which had been circled in red and blown up in print, stand out garishly against her skin.

“So,” she says “he took you back then.”

Jack’s confused.

“What?” he asks, somewhat redundantly since he’s sure his blank face gives it away.

“He took you back,” she says, nodding at him and gesturing at all the equipment he’s gathered in the kitchen, “you better not break his heart again.”

Jack’s got a sneaking suspicion that she’s interpreting everything wrong.

“Um, Harmony…” he stammers out and then watches as she heaves an exasperated sigh.

“You’re here, aren’t you?” she says, as if it’s the final word on the subject.

He can understand why she thinks that. He’s in Kenny’s house and cooking for him during what Jack knows is one of the more difficult moments of his life. Kent doesn’t just do that, he compartmentalizes, only slowly lets someone in to the deepest recesses of himself, and God forbid someone hurts him.

Huh.

He’s still trying to process that when he hears a quiet but empathetic “shit” and Kent comes skidding into the kitchen. He darts past his sister and Jack, flicking the kettle as he passes, then he leans up to grab a mug from the cupboard above his head while fiddling for a spoon in a drawer at the same time. He turns - victorious, grinning smugly - and freezes. His eyes dart from where Harmony is leaning, to Jack standing with the egg carton still in hand, to the utensils and ingredients spread out on the kitchen island. Slowly, he puts the mug and spoon down on the bench, two small dings and then everything is quiet.

“Uh,” he says eloquently, eyes doing their quick dart around again.

The serious expression falls from Harmony’s face and she looks every inch the mischievous girl he knew her to be in the past.

“I’m gonna get dressed, leave you to it,” she says, then exits.

Kent’s shuffling his feet, something he’d only started to do after their first season together in the Q. His eyes are still flicking between Jack and the island, and there’s an expression of almost childlike bewilderment on his face.

“You - You really,” he says before trailing off.

Jack can feel his own shoulders hunch upward and it’s only through summoning his last reserves of courage that he plants his feet and doesn’t look away.

“Well, eh, I just -”

There’s a sudden bang from behind him. He startles, dropping the egg carton on the floor as he does so, and sees Harmony’s grinning face leaning around the doorway.

“Take your time. No one’s gonna care if you’re late,” she winks and laughs when she sees their startled expressions.

“What the fuck, Harmony,” Kent interjects, exasperation mixed in with the irrepressible fondness that only older siblings have for their smaller counterparts. “You’re cleaning up the fucking eggs!”

He turns back to Jack and waits and he doesn’t say anything, but Jack knows. He knows he’s going to have to be the one to say something. His hands are clammy and his breath is coming a bit faster than usual - not too fast though, he knows how to keep an eye on that.

Kent’s the one who leaned over and whispered how much he loved winning the Memorial Cup with his boyfriend and then waited to see how Jack would react.

Kent’s the one who called and called after everything went down, who came to Samwell the first time swearing that “your mum said it would be alright, I didn’t mean to -” as he backed away from Jack’s invectives.

Kent’s the one who came back, swearing he missed him, and he didn’t handle that well but Jack could have tried to understand. He just hadn’t felt like it at the time.

Once burned, twice shy. For Kent to even be standing there, waiting, that takes something. It takes Kent’s singular ability to scramble to the top of the proverbial hill, shake his fists and fling curses at the heavens, be struck down for his hubris, and rise again with a glorious fuck you.

Jack can be brave and slightly reckless too. He evicted an entire, drunk, football team from the Haus armed with only a fire extinguisher. He survived being chased by the flock of Samwell geese after his flash startled them and returned to photograph them again. He got between Tater and Bitty’s blueberry jam, multiple times.

He swallows, focuses his attention on a tile just beyond Kent’s head, and speaks;

“I - I, just - I don’t like seeing you - I mean, eugh, I don’t like not being able to - I mean. I feel like, we should, we should be a team and I know, I know, it’s partly on me, but God, Kenny, I want, I want to, I wish we were, I mean...” He gathers his breath and says in one big rush “I’dreallylikeitifwecouldtryagain.”

He looks at Kent’s face and it’s blinding: hope and fear and sheer overwhelming joy all mixed together in one.

“Really?” he breathes, stepping forward and Jack can’t tear his eyes away. The way the sunlight is spilling into the kitchen makes it look like Kent is walking in a natural spotlight. Kent darts around the spilled eggs and he’s wrapping his arms around Jack’s neck and he’s leaning up -

“Glad you’ve got your shit sorted, but we’re really gonna be late. Well, you’re gonna be really late, but whatever.” Harmony interrupts.

They both startle and he looks at Kent’s wristwatch as his arms move back past his face. Harmony’s right they’re going to be at least half an hour late, if traffic’s good.

“We’ll drive through a Starbucks,” he says, pushing Kent towards the doorway. They’re almost at the front door when Kent snaps to attention.

“I’ll just, I’ll just grab our bags,” he says, darting away, leaving Jack alone with Harmony.

She’s in another one of Kent’s shirts, arms folded as she stares at him. Her eyes are unyielding, reminding him of Lardo, when she found out some Freshman had been ignoring her schedules. She steps forward, pushes a finger into his chest, looks deep into his soul and says, “If you ever hurt him like that again I will eviscerate you. I will rip your balls out with a rusty spork and I will make sure that you regret you’ve ever been born.”

“Yes ma’am,” he replies quickly and then flushes bright red with mortification when he realises what he said.

Then Kent’s back, eyes suspicious as he looks between his sister and boyfriend, but then he shrugs and drags them both through the door and down to the carpark. Once they’re all settled in his car - a red convertible because Kenny doesn’t know how to do anything inconspicuously - he tunes into a sports radio station and then they’re driving.

***

It’s only the fact that it wasn’t a game day, and that Kent had experienced - what Coach Hernandez called - a fucking shit storm erupt in his life, that saved him from severe punishment. He still has to bag skate for fucking ever, though.

The team rallies around him, slapping him on the back and inviting him and Harmony to so many dinners that he’s slightly exhausted just thinking about it. Still he smiles, and laughs, and manages to duck out of every single party without causing offence. Well, except for the invite issued by Sums - who’d stared at him so intensely that the unspoken threat if he demurred was crystal clear.

Kent still tries to avoid the invitation and he manages until Sums fucking informs the media a few weeks later that Kent promised to come for lunch the next day. Which was a low blow, but surprisingly effective, because it’s on the dot midday and he’s standing on the doorstep frantically smoothing down his pressed shirt and trying to remember if he brought the wine, before seeing it in Harmony’s hands.

Harmony pokes him in the side.

“Oi, numbnuts, fucking chill.”

She sticks out her tongue at him - which is totally at odds with the vaguely angelic look she’s cultivated with a white cocktail dress and her hair in ringlets - before reaching out to rap on the door.

It opens just before her hand gets there and her tongue is still sticking out.

“Your face will get stuck like that,” comes the self-assured voice of Macey, peeking out from behind her father’s broad form.

Harmony flushes a deep red and Kent feels at once smugly amused that she got what was coming to her and completely mortified.

“Thank you for having us,” she says as she thrusts the wine forward.

Sums gestures them in with a smile, introducing Harmony to Macey and Cammie, before leading them through to the dining room. In the background, he sees that the TV has already been switched on for the Aces versus Aeros game, but he can’t focus on that because Sums has cooked a motherfucking roast.

“What the fuck,” he says.

“Swear jar,” says Cammie primly and when he turns to look at Sums, he’s greeted by a proffered glass jar that’s already two-thirds full.

“Twenty bucks.”

“When it’s full we’re going to Disneyland!” Macey says.

“ _If_ it’s full,” Sums says, darkly.

Behind his back, Cammie’s face looks sceptical.

“I figured we’d celebrate the fact that you finally came,” says Sums. Kent thinks he looks appropriately abashed because his captain lets out a booming laugh while slapping him on the back. “Nah, I get it. You’ve been too busy for your poor captain.”

“He was scared you’d start talking about polynomials,” Harmony says as they pull out chairs.

Sums fucking lights up and Macey groans.

“Now you’ve done it,” she says, while Cammie shakes her head disapprovingly at them, “Dad loves to talk about polynomials.”

Thankfully the math conversation stops the instant the puck drops, and Kent can contribute more to the discussion than “that’s when you multiply x by two, right?” causing Sums to legitimately turn white. In the background he hears Harmony whispering something that causes Macey and Cammie to break out in slightly guilty giggles.

The game is brutal. Nothing’s changed since the last time he saw the Aces play a game. Their line is falling apart, their passes aren’t connecting, and they’re ignoring Coach Mark’s red faced shouting or attempts to swap out players. Instead, they appear to be taking coaching direction from Swoops - on the bench instead of the VIP box, despite the cast wrapping around his arm.

The commentators aren’t amused. Between the second and third period, James Copely starts to conduct an acrimonious interview with Schnaps.

“Whatever your feelings about the Trade, don’t you at least owe it to the fans to grow up?”

“With all due respect, James, we don’t think - ”

“Cut the bullshit. This is a temper tantrum, pure and simple, the fact is -”

The interview ends with Schnaps storming out in response. On screen, Copely raises his hands heavenward and rolls his eyes:

“Unbelievable, that’s just completely -”

“Unprofessional,” interjects Rebecca Laslow.

Then there’s a bang and heavy breathing in the background and they both stop talking.

“I think we’re still picking up something from Schnabel’s mic -”

“ -ey, hey, calm down, ok?” Sheik’s voice, quiet and placating.

“Calm down? Calm down? They don’t fucking know what they’re talking about!”

“I know, I know but -”

“They traded Parser because he’s gay and we’re supposed to listen to their fucking bullshit? ‘It’s important to create a welcoming atmosphere’ but I guess that’s only when they fucking feel like it because that was... that was fucking... and we’re supposed to care about winning the Cup again? Fuck that.”

There’s a strange sort of ringing in Kent’s head. This is it. The sword of Damocles has fallen. He’s the first Out player in the NHL and, based on the hits he’s taken, based on James Copely’s shocked and slightly disgusted expression, it’s not going to be easy.

He feels his phone start to buzz insistently in his back pocket while on screen his erstwhile teammates take to the ice.

He doesn’t really notice.


	5. Chapter 5

**[Listen here!](https://www.dropbox.com/s/zott8109qqvub1u/%5BCP%5D%20Whatever%20became%20of%20our%20youth%20%285%29.mp3?dl=0) **

***

The bed is comfortable where Jack is settled in with a book he picked up on the Civil War era, his phone is resting next to him on the bedside table, and the lights are dimmed. All told, he’s having an absolutely lovely afternoon. Admittedly, he’s just reached the part where Jackson was elected and he’s taking a moment to pinch his nose but it is nice to just sit and read for once.

His phone buzzes and he frowns, picking it up.

Then he stills - the screen is flashing Shitty’s name. Which makes no sense, Shitty had walked him through his schedule just last week and two-o’clock on a Wednesday is firmly in “suffering under the system to survive” territory.

He picks up.

“Brah! Are you ok? How are you holding up? Stay put, I’m driving to see you - I’ll tell my bosses I have a family emergency - I’ll be there in, what the fuck no that’s too long, I’m flying out to see you - I’ll see you tomorrow, I can let myself in if you’re not there.”

He pauses and Jack’s finally able to interject, tentatively, “What’s wrong?”

He hears Shitty’s quick intake of breath then -

“You don’t know?”

He doesn’t answer. His head is spinning, faces swirling. Something’s wrong. Something’s badly enough wrong that Shitty’s taking a leave of absence.

“Is everyone ok?”

There’s a telling pause and then Shitty’s speaking cautiously.

“Kent got outed, Jack.”

“How?”

Shitty carefully picks his way through the minefield of the conversation he found himself in, but by the end of it Jack knows two things to be absolutely true. Number one, he needs to go to Kent. Number two, he doesn’t need Shitty to be there.

He manages to convince Shitty of the second realisation by promising to call every night.

“Every night, Jackalope?”

“Every night.”

He’s out the door before Shitty’s finished hanging up. He almost leaves the house in his pyjamas but then he spies himself in the elevator doors and it’s back to change, grab a bag, and go.

A lot of the season makes sense now. The way some players would deliberately target Kent on ice or look at him off, the game against the Aces that was so fucking weird, and the resurgence of chirps based around their time in the Q - carefully calibrated not to fall foul of the NHL’s new rules.

God, this is their worst nightmare. This is the worst nightmare of every single queer player he’s spoken to or heard about. Sure, they might have come out to trusted friends or their teams but there’s no way in hell they ever want to come out to the public.

Who’d willingly face step into the spotlight that Bettman had so kindly positioned for them by saying the NHL was just waiting for someone to come out? Who’d willingly face the fan forums and blogs analysing which players were too faggy? Who’d willingly brave the players who’d shy away, the harder hits, the jokes about bending over? Who’d volunteer to become the poster child for inclusivity and acceptance, sent on the media circuit to boost the NHL’s image or risk their career? Who’d want to have all their achievements and accolades, successes and failures, reduced to their sexuality? Who’d risk having every future award being called suspect by observers and, in their darkest moments, themselves?

He’s halfway to Kent’s apartment when he remembers Sum’s invitation. He executes an illegal u-turn (a Zimmermann getting pulled over by the police for bad driving isn’t going to rate a mention today) and drives back to the house he’d lived in those first few weeks.

He pulls up the road and stops at the huge gate stretching across the drive - in a way it had never been while he lived there - before calling Sums and demanding to be let in. Outside the car, there are camera flashes and shouted questions. Coming here isn’t going to help any of the rumours about them but he doesn’t care. The gate slides open and he speeds in, causing a few paps to spring out of the way of his car.

When he gets to the door, he’s greeted by a harried Harmony who grabs his arm with a, “Thank God!”

He’s led through to the lounge where Kent is sitting on the couch and, Christ, he wasn’t deluding himself after that first practice. Something had been wrong, because Kent looks exactly the same now as he did then - he’s pale, his skin is waxy, and his eyes don’t seem to be focusing on anything.

Jack can feel his own heartbeat rise in response but he stamps his panic down, viciously, completely ignoring his therapist’s advice to float intrusive thoughts down a stream while reassuring them that he’d process later. There wasn’t enough time for that. Instead, he kneels down and grabs Kent’s hands, holding tightly.

“How long’s he been like this?” he asks.

Harmony’s shaking so it’s Sums who answers from where he’s standing next to him.

“Since it happened. So, around twenty to two”

Fucking Christ.

“We’ve been trying to tell him it will be ok but -” Harmony interjects and Jack nods.

“Kenny, I need you to focus on where you can feel my hands yeah? They’re a bit rough, can you feel it? Comes from playing hockey from the moment I could stand I guess. And you can feel just under my middle finger where I broke it that time in juniors. It’s a little bit bent. You feel it? God, I was so stupid. What were we thinking, eh? Climbing over a fence like that the night before a game. My dad was so mad, kept saying that I could have jeopardised everything, that I could have broken a leg or my ankle and really messed everything up.”

“And you would have played through it too, you fucking nimbwit,” comes Kent’s voice - raspy, and slightly distant, but there nonetheless.

Harmony breaks into sobs and Sums heaves a sigh.

“Well,” Jack says decisively, “I want a hot chocolate. What about you?”

Kent’s response is slow, like it takes him a while to process the question, but he nods cautiously and there’s the relief everyone else was experiencing. They’re not out of the woods yet, he knows that better than the others, but at least Kenny’s making choices.

He follows Sums into the kitchen and helps him with the stove and milk, studiously ignoring the questions in his eyes. Then he helps him carry the mugs back through the lounge. When they arrive Kent is talking on the phone, someone from management given his serious expression and tone of voice. Harmony is curled up on the couch next to him, refusing to take her eyes off her brother, looking incalculably young and she grasps her mug of hot chocolate with relief.

Jack settles in to wait while Sums frowns and answers his own phone with marked trepidation.

“If you tell me to do anything except be incredibly supportive, I will fuck something up,” he says as he walks away, then startles and looks contrite. “Yes, I’m very sorry for assuming that you were homophobic, yes I understand that could be very hurtful, no, I didn’t know about your sister -” before Jack can’t hear anything else.

Jack thinks, then, that this was what Georgia meant when she said she looked for a team where he would fit and he feels some of the residual resentment over the trade slip away. She was good people, and he knows, somehow, that she pushed hard for him to end up here. He knows that given the way it all played out, given that Kent ended up here too, that she would have spent at least the next few months fighting for her survival as GM. He knows she wouldn’t care, not if it meant that she’d sent him somewhere safe.

He wishes Kent had had management like that on the Aces.

***

The next day is a motherfucking shitstorm and Kent kind of wishes that he could have hidden in Sums’ guest room instead of facing the day. Instead, he wakes up at ass-o’clock in the morning to meet with Anthea in Sums’ kitchen.

When he stumbles down the stairs blearily, he groans. There’s more people there than he was expecting. Anthea, yeah, and Jack, and the intern that had fetched his pre-packed bag from his house, but also GM Van Jaarsveld, someone who looks like a lawyer, and two burly men built like bodyguards.

He groans.

“I can’t deal with this before coffee,” and then stares in no small amount of frustration at Sums’ kettle. It needs to go on the stove like some kind of heathen. It’s the twenty-first century, he doesn’t understand why his fellow Americans can’t catch up with the times and literally the rest of the world by actually using electric ones. A nation of convenience food and impatient consumers but somehow electric kettles are a bridge too far.

The intern stumbles forward and proffers a take-away cup which Kent takes sourly. It has the motherfucking gall to taste decent so he can’t complain about that.

Anthea looks as perfectly polished as ever and when she speaks she sounds calm and in control. Kent’s reluctantly impressed.

“Before we get started, Kent, I’d just like to assure you that we had no idea why you were being traded and, if we had known, we would have made very different decisions at the beginning. What was done to you was inexcusable and I want you to know that the Schooners will stand behind you every step of the way.” She waits for his nod before she continues, “We will not trade you because of your sexuality and if you are treated any differently in the locker room, we will take strong steps to discourage further discrimination.”

Fucking great, it’s going to be like that. Everyone hates the teacher’s pet, hates the snitch, hates the coddled and cosseted. If they do this, it will just make everything worse. He can’t say that, though, not when he’s so new and they look so sure that he’ll welcome these assurances. So he paints a smile onto his face, gives a gracious nod, and resolves that no matter how bad it gets he’s not running to management.

Jack turns away to hide a laugh, the bastard.

The conversation continues for hours and hours, talking about his new bodyguards, the PR strategy they’re going to follow, highlighting any legal issues that they could face and the steps they will take if he faces harassment on the ice. At one point, GM Van Jaarsveld gives Jack a sidelong look, opens his mouth in question, and gets quelled by a severe look from Anthea.

As they leave, he hears her whispering to him fiercely, “Yes, I know that we need to know, but it would be terribly gauche to ask, not to mention, potentially homophobic.”

Behind him his new bodyguard snorts and then looks contrite.

He eyes the bag on the floor and grins.

“It’s my fuck it all bag,” he says to Jack and watches a wary look spread across his face.

“Your fuck it all bag?”

“Yeah, see, I thought that maybe, one day, it would all get a bit much. Someone might say or do something even worse than outing a kid on Twitter or one of my NDAs wouldn’t hold as solidly as it should or whatever and I might wake up to myself and think ‘fuck it all.’”

Jack appears to have some idea of where this is going but he also knows that he can’t do shit about it.

“Kenny,” he says, imbuing the word with exasperation, fondness, and the kind of chastisement only a captain or former captain can manage.

Kent salutes him with his third coffee of the day.

Kent greets the world by walking to the car in a black shirt with a rainbow coloured flag on it, a Pride themed snapback, while lazily sucking on a lollipop. The shocked faces of the paps make it all worth it.

One of his new bodyguards slides into the driver seat before he can get to it and the only reason he doesn’t complain is because it would be bad fucking optics. He ends up spending the drive scrolling through twitter because he has zero self-control and a pathological need to know what people are saying about him.

     Nicki Harris @PastelsandPears - @maryquitecontrary What did I tell you? [gif - Gay - diddy - gay -gay -gay -gay] #Parsegate

     Jeffrey Troy @TheSwoops - @ParseKV [gif - You’re my friend. My best friend] #gotyourback #youcanplay

     Rebecca Laslow @LaslowTweets - Now that we know the reason, was the @LVAces a players revolt #justified. Read more bit.ly/324098

     Ashley Simons @tayswift4ever - @LVAces [gif - judging you]

     NHL @NHL - Joint statement with @YouCanPlay regarding @ParseKV and the @LVAces to come at 11am CST.

     Max Langford @LangfordShore - Called it @ParseKV is a fucking faggot #proud of the @LVAces for standing up to the PC Brigade. #Parsegate

     Talia Nisbit @notthatnisbit - Wait you’re telling me @ParseKV experienced a hate crime and still played like that all season? #motherfucking legend

    George Browning @itsacommonname - @ParseKV is outed and emerges from hiding sucking a lollipop #atrueicon #thegayweneed

Well, that’s pretty much what he expected.

The car pulls up at the Ship and he takes a deep breath, adjusts his snapback, and gets out. Behind him, Jack pulls up, disembarks, and calls out as he walks towards him, “Sums decided to include Harmony in his school run.”

He nods and takes a deep breath. The walls on the inside of the Ship were painted a light grey, and they kept the sea theme picking a dark blue carpet with patterned swirls. Hey, no one said that hockey teams were particularly classy institutions. _Victory green_ , he thinks, snorting derisively, _is a case in point_.

They reach the locker room doors and he pauses.

“You can... you can... I mean, I can wait a bit so it’s not...” he trails off. Jack’s looking at him though, shoulders squared, and face set. Kent never thought he’d see that determined, single-minded protection aimed in his direction ever again.

“I’m not distancing myself from you, if that’s what you mean,” Jack says dismissively and Kent nods.

He stretches his hands out, pushes the doors open, and steps into a silent locker room. Chells has positioned himself near Kent’s locker and yells out when he sees him.

“Fucking Schnaps! Er ist dummkopf.”

Despite himself, Kent can’t help laughing and then he gratefully takes the opening.

“He always did find technology a bit...”

“It just keeps changing, all those buttons,” says Jack, just as Chells repeats sagely, “See, dummkopf.”

Jack paints a hurt expression on to his face, then says, mock injured, “I thought you were my friend.”

“Not if you’re a dummkopf like Schnaps,” comes the reply and then they’re off. The team’s attention has shifted to watch and join in with their chirping exchange. By the time Sums arrives, gets the measure of the situation, and calls Jack a luddite, the message is clear - out there, his sexuality might be an issue, but in the locker room it better not be.

After Anthea arrived in another perfectly pressed pantsuit to outline the organisation’s strategy and threaten them all within an inch of their life if they do anything even borderline homophobic, and GM Van Jaarsveld talked about how “recent revelations” gave them a “unique opportunity for favourable positioning,” it’s even clearer. Homophobes will find no quarter with the Schooners.

Kent still watches everyone’s reactions, though. At the end of the day, he needs to know which teammates not to go out with, which teammates to avoid sharing personal details with, which teammates might decide not to back him up in a play or push him into a dangerous situation. There are a few, of course, but far less than he was expecting, and only two of the players he would have called friends are in their number.

He tells himself it doesn’t matter, that they were new friendships, that he still has other friends - better friends - and that on-balance he’s doing better than some of the people he’s talked to online. It doesn’t stop the sharp stab of pain in his heart as he remembers joking with them and laughing, knowing that won’t happen again simply because of something as immutable as the colour of his hair. There was beauty in who he was, in who he loved, and it was their fault for not seeing it. Didn’t mean it didn’t fucking hurt though.

As they leave to get on the ice, he hears Mads whispering to another player that:

“Parser’s fucking lucky he’s not playing like a fag, even if he is one.”

Nothing he wasn’t expecting, he reminds himself as he steps onto the ice; it’s nothing he wasn’t expecting.

***

Jack didn’t expect that it would be this bad. He never thought anything could be worse than the media circus which surrounded the Q, but God, was he wrong. In the Q, there weren’t swathes of people who showed up to cheer for the other team, simply because they were playing them. In the Q, there weren’t death threats and bomb threats and security screenings of everyone who attended a game just to be sure they would all leave safely. In the Q, there was pressure to succeed but not pressure to be perfect. Kent isn’t allowed to fuck up, if he fucks up then suddenly it’s proof that hockey is only for straights. Proof that despite the PR, they can’t play.

There are prime time discussion forums where devil’s advocates and moderates pretend that the Aces had logical, non-homophobic reasons to trade Kent and even if they did trade him because he was gay it wasn’t homophobic just sound business sense. There are concerned discussions about whether or not Harmony is really safer living with her gay brother than with her parents. There are an endless stream of reporters calling to try and get any Schooner on the record saying something negative about Kent.

The games are brutal. There are rainbow flags in the crowd, screaming support to try and drown out the booing. There are players making blatantly illegal checks or straight up dropping gloves with little to no response from officials on the ice. There are think pieces in support and think pieces in opposition. There are endless questions about them, politely couched in press conferences and crudely shouted by paparazzi:

“Jack, did you know?”

“How do you think this has impacted on locker room dynamics?”

“Is this why you got in a fight that first practice?”

“Are you a homophobe?”

“What impact is this having on your Stanley Cup run?”

“Are you a fag too, Jack?”

“Did you try to kill yourself because of your gay feelings?”

On and on and on until he’s actively fighting each day to get out of bed, to face the fire, grit his teeth, and force out “no comment,” when all he wants to do is scream at them. Lash out and let loose a stream of profanity he didn’t even know he had in him.

But, of course, he’s got it easy. Kent’s spending his off days with Youth Outreach Centres, he’s making videos for You Can Play, and he’s uploading silly outtakes of his life onto Instagram. He’s smiling at the children who come shakily up to him, asking for advice or thanking him and then giving genuinely thoughtful advice. He’s answering press questions with a smile and wink, or blanking inappropriate questions so completely that his face has spawned a thousand “talk to the hand/bitch please/I did not just hear that” gifs across the internet - because that’s the other thing, Kent isn’t just a sports celebrity anymore, everyone knows who he is.

For a while, Jack deludes himself into believing that Kent’s coping better. He always has, after all, and a darkly insidious voice points out that he seemed to land on his feet perfectly well after the Draft. Jack tries to ignore it but it’s harder and harder with every public appearance, with every smile Kent sends that doesn’t look forced, with every conversation they have when it’s just them in person or online and Kent’s loose and relaxed.

Then Harmony sends him a video. It’s a compilation of sneaky shots she’s taken of Kent. It’s him coming home and collapsing, shaking or crying. Stumbling like a drunk until he clutches Kit to his chest and visibly calms down. Throwing a vase and watching it shatter with a detached look on his face. Having conversations with his body guards while looking wan and drawn.

She doesn’t add anything to it, she doesn’t have to; her disapproval comes through loud and clear.

Jack shapes up. He lets himself into Kent’s apartment and watches as his boyfriend startles. There are deep circles underneath his eyes, he’s curled up in his comfort pyjamas, and watching a documentary about Britney, circa 2007. When he sees Jack, his expression visibly changes, his eyes brighten and a smile appears on his face. This time, for the first time, Jack doesn’t allow himself to be fooled.

“Oh, Kenny,” he says softly and watches the expression falter and then collapse completely. Within seconds his arms are filled with all six feet and one inch of a sobbing hockey player. Kenny’s shaking like he’s going to explode if he doesn’t stop. Jack can feel his self-loathing start to rise, a steady drip-drip-drip of condemnation, of “you’re a fucking horrible boyfriend,” “can’t even do this right,” “and you say you _love_ him?” but he thinks fiercely that he’s here now and that’s what matters. He can do better. He has to do better.

When Kent calms down, curled up like a cat next to him on the couch, Jack speaks:

“Do you wanna have some fun with this?”

Kent’s eyes narrow and he tilts his head slightly - intrigued but not getting too hopeful yet.

“I was thinking... I was thinking, well, they already think, but it’s not confirmed and, how horrible would it be - for them I mean - if we’re just Out but they can’t say anything because there’s no proof and they know, they know, my parents will take them to the cleaners if they get it wrong.”

Kent’s still hesitating but Jack knows him, he knows Kent wants to say yes. So he leans closer, until there’s so little space between their lips that the air between them feels alive and whispers,

“Kenny, you’ve been so _good,”_

He spends the night comforting him but in the morning he turns and sees Kent grinning next to him, and he knows his answer.

They stop hiding.

There are hands in pockets, arms tugging each other wherever they want the other to go, there are apologetic grins over shoulders, and they go on what are obviously dates even if no one is willing to be the first to say it without covering their asses by adding a question mark to all their reporting.

Kent takes Jack to the JFK Memorial Library the day after they play the Bruins. It’s snowing when they get there and it’s almost like they’re in their own world. They’re looking out a window and all they can see is the white of the snow on the ground outside, the white walls around them, the snow falling from the white sky endless and uninterrupted onto fathomless gray water. They kiss in an alcove overlooking the ocean and it’s the most peaceful moment they have all season.

Jack takes Kent out to the Ferris Wheel, and they have the kind of date they should have had as teenagers but couldn’t because they weren’t straight and were headed for the NHL. They’re walking, shoving each other, sharing candy and laughing about how Frank, the nutritionist, is going to have a heart attack when he sees the candids.

They don’t win the Cup; they get knocked out after forcing a seventh game in the second round of the playoffs, which is better than the Schooners have performed in six years, but that doesn’t seem to matter to the coverage about how their unmistakable queerness was the reason they lost (Jeremy Winthrop @WinthropDeadspin - Did the Schooners Unconventional Approach to the Locker Room Hurt Their Cup Run? http://d./nhl/9896337).

There’s time spent recalibrating in the post-season, there’s summer and the season starts again and in between there’s Kenny. There’s nights laughing on the couch with Harmony and kissing him without caring who sees and there’s sitting on the bench together, a pair against the world. There’s a quiet moment, on an isolated beach in Seattle, when he asks Kent to marry him and Kent looks at him like he can’t believe this moment ever came while Harmony live-streams the whole thing on her phone, without either of them noticing, because she’s a little shit that way.

Afterwards, he shares two photos on Instagram. The first is of Kent sitting laughing on his lap, young and fresh, floppy hair spilling into his face as his head is tilted back. The second is of Kent, sitting so close to him on the bench that Jack’s 1 looks almost like the second digit of Kent’s 90, whispering something with a wicked grin on his face. He captions it _I’ve been thinking, just sitting thinking, on why I love you ... you’re my future, baby, you’re my right now_ and watches the delighted expression cross Kent’s face when he recognises the words.

***

The body next to him stirs in its sleep and Kent smiles. He looks at the clock, ten minutes till their alarms will go off, and slips out of bed. He pads towards the kitchen and checks their shared whiteboard on the fridge. Nothing planned today except for open practice and a documentary Jack wants to watch about, Kent squints, Gustav Stressemann - whoever the fuck he is - at 8.30. He pulls open the door, and pushes aside food and drink until he triumphantly locates the milk.

Four-ish years with that passive aggressive blonde from Samwell and Jack really learnt both how to appreciate cooking and how to actually do it. Kent isn’t complaining now, though, he’s mature enough to grudgingly admit Jack’s better for having dated him. Besides, Kent wasn’t stupid enough to have Jack and then give him up. Who the fuck would? Only an idiot, that’s who.

He flicks on the electric kettle which Jack had spent a solid three minutes laughing about and pulls out two travel mugs. He’s just finishing pouring the milk, when he hears Jack start stirring in the bedroom.

The rest of the morning passes as normal, he takes the first shower while Jack makes breakfast, Jack takes the second while he does the dishes, and then they’re dashing out the door coffee in hand chirping each other about poor time management.

They drive to the Ship, make their way to the locker room and then split off to their own groups as they get ready for the ice. They lose track of each other as they do lazy warm ups and Kent gets caught up chirping Chells about the hickey blooming just underneath his left ear.

He hears Jack’s voice rising above the din and looks over to where he’s passionately talking to Hazza who is staring at him with a look of pure terror. He starts to skate over, slowly, lazily. Does a couple of the elegant turns he learnt the summer after Perry pulled off a single axle to escape a collision in a game against the Aces. They’d fucking practiced that play; it was dirty, obviously, but it was supposed to look like an accident. It fucking would have if it wasn’t for that asshole’s fucking figure skating background.

There’s always something.

“ - but see, most maps that we teach students conserve the hegemony of Western imperialism and there’s little reason why we can’t teach kids to use the, I don’t know -”

“Pierce Quincical,” he interjects from slightly behind Jack, who startles but nods absently and powers ahead with his point.

“Yeah, thanks Kenny, really challenge their conceptions of reality.”

“I don’t know, wouldn’t the Fuller Projection do that better?”

This is his life now, chirping Zimms about maps. He ignores the pleased little thrill that rushes through him when he thinks that, focuses on Zimms’ reaction. Jack’s face is slipping into that stubborn little furrow between his eyes, presaging a more eloquent defence. He gives Kent a fondly irritated look but remains determined.

“Yeah, well, maybe but they’re kids. They can’t handle that. Anyway, my point stands. Gauss proved that you can’t accurately translate a sphere to a plane. So you always lose something and why should we be stuck with the Mercator?”

“Zimms, we’ve talked about this, it’s not going to change. _The New York Times_ and _The West Wing_ tried and nothing happened. Completely tragic, I know.”

He presses up tightly against Jack’s side, looking up at those laughing blue eyes, and for a moment they’re back in those glorious summer days before the Draft: them alone, a perfect pair, isolated in a dreamscape while the world went mad outside. Not that different from now, if he’s honest, as he catches another glimpse of the ever interested press.

Hazza takes the opportunity Kent was kind enough to create for him and skates away. Most people take LSDs to end up with that look on their faces, so Hazza was fucking weak. He hadn’t even heard Jack talking about overlaying spiritual and temporal realms in medieval European maps. So what if he learnt there was no accurate way to transfer a sphere onto a two-dimensional plane?

Fucking amateur.

Then he’s checking Zimms with his shoulder, and skating backwards when Jack looks at him with faux betrayal. He throws his head back and laughs when Jack starts chasing him. In the stands, he can see press camera’s trained in their direction but he doesn’t care.

He doesn’t care because Sums and Chells are standing off to the side shouting something about the honeymoon phase.

He doesn’t care because Jack is smiling and laughing, looking young and at ease, and he did that. He’s the reason Jack looks comfortable in his own skin and isn’t hiding away like he’s scared of the world.

He doesn’t care because for the first time since those halcyon days of their youth, everything’s perfect. There are matching rings on their fingers, mirrored names on their jerseys, and no reason to believe that this will ever end.

~ fin ~

**Author's Note:**

> Huge thanks to [ViciousHyperbolizer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/B_Frizzy/pseuds/ViciousHyperbolizer) who beta'd this fic and without whom it would be much the poorer, [Annapods](http://archiveofourown.org/users/annapods) who podficced this work, and the wonderful [OMGCP Back Up Big Bang](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/OMGCPbackupbang) mods who stepped up and ensured that this fest would go ahead undeterred.
> 
> Title adapted from Charles Simic's [ _The Stray_](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58434/the-stray)
> 
> Please leave a comment or kudos if you enjoyed reading this, and I hope you did.


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